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New York, NY (September 21, 2023) — Yesterday in London, the Booker Prize committee announced its shortlist for fiction, including three books published by Farrar, Straus and Giroux: If I Survive You by Jonathan Escoffery (MCD/FSG, 9/6/22; Picador, 9/5/23); Western Lane by Chetna Maroo (FSG, 2/7/23; Picador, 11/21/23); and The Bee Sting by Paul Murray (FSG, 8/15/23). This is an unprecedented number of books chosen by the Booker Prize committee for a single US publisher in the same year.
Mitzi Angel, President and Publisher of Farrar, Straus and Giroux, states: “We were thrilled to receive the news of the Booker shortlist. Each of these writers is singular in talent; each takes the reader to an extraordinary place. We applaud Jonathan, Chetna, and Paul on their nominations and are so proud to publish their work at FSG.”
If I Survive You by Jonathan Escoffery is a novel in stories that follows a Jamaican American family of four over several decades in Miami both before and after Hurricane Andrew as they navigate the trapdoors of capitalism, race, generational dysfunction, and cultural dislocation. It has received an extraordinary amount of acclaim since its publication in September 2022, garnering nominations for the National Book Award, the National Book Critics’ Circle Award, and the PEN/Faulkner Award. On NPR’s Fresh Air, Maureen Corrigan described If I Survive You as “an intensively granular, yet panoramic depiction of what it’s like to try to make it—or not—in this kaleidoscopic madhouse of a country . . . Not since Moby-Dick has the all-American ethos of ‘sink or swim’ on your own been dramatized to such devastating effect.”
Western Lane by Chetna Maroo is a taut, enthralling first novel about grief, sisterhood, and a young athlete’s struggle to transcend herself. An indelible coming-of-age story, Western Lane is a valentine to innocence, to the closeness of sisterhood, to the strange ways we come to know ourselves and each other. As the author Yiyun Li wrote, “Combining the precision and the efficiency of an athlete with the mysteries of childhood loss and memory, Western Lane is a novel in which we linger on every breathing line and relish every close observation.”
The Bee Sting by Paul Murray, from the author of the internationally acclaimed Skippy Dies (itself long-listed for the Booker Prize), is a sweeping, symphonic tragicomedy about a single struggling household in post-crash Ireland, and the long-buried secrets unearthed by the collapse of their family car dealership. Released in the US on August 15, it has been widely hailed as Murray’s most ambitious achievement to date. Writing in the Los Angeles Times, Jonathan Russell Clark described The Bee Sting as “hilarious and sardonic, heartbreaking and beautiful,” adding, “there’s just no other way to put it: The Bee Sting is a masterpiece.”
Farrar, Straus and Company was founded in 1946 by Roger W. Straus and John C. Farrar. In 1964, Robert Giroux’s name was added to the roster and the company became Farrar, Straus and Giroux. The firm is renowned for its international list of literary fiction, nonfiction, poetry, and children’s books. Farrar, Straus and Giroux authors have won extraordinary acclaim over the years, including numerous National Book Awards and Pulitzer Prizes, and twenty-five Nobel Prizes in Literature.
