| It’s T-minus 54 hours until the Booker prize 2024 longlist is unveiled, and so we thought it only right to dedicate this week’s edition to serving you up some predictions before the “Booker Dozen” – the 12 or 13 titles in contention for one of the world’s most prestigious literary prizes – arrives on Tuesday. The longlist often throws together the expected – new books by big-name authors – with wild cards in the form of little-known debuts. But who will make the cut this year? We asked for tips from four literary pros: Guardian chief books writer Lisa Allardice, critic Yagnishsing Dawoor, author Michael Donkor and longtime Observer critic, Anthony Cummins. (Our esteemed fiction editor, Justine Jordan, hasn’t taken part as she’s on the judging panel this year). Here are their picks … The top-voted title was JamesbyPercival Everett; Allardice, Donkor and Cummins all guessed it will be in the mix. The “magisterial and ambitious response to Huckleberry Finn”, narrated by the enslaved Jim, would be a “welcome presence” on the list, said Donkor. Both Dawoor and Cummins thought Praiseworthyby Alexis Wright could feature. Set in northern Australia, the novel is a 736-page “mighty satirical doorstopper about Aboriginal dispossession, assimilation and climate crisis,” Dawoor said. “It is ambitious, polyphonic and utterly heedless of convention.” The pair also independently floated Hisham Matar’s My Friends – centred on a real-life event from 1984, when gunmen opened fire on protesters at the Libyan embassy in London – and Sunjeev Sahota’s The Spoiled Heart, about a man running to be a union leader. Long Island by Colm Tóibínalso may appear, said Donkor and Allardice. The sequel to Brooklyn is “a finely observed study of the limitations of community and the complexities of achieving personal freedom, told in quiet prose,” Donkor said. Allardice and Cummins both flagged two September novels: Sally Rooney’s much-anticipated fourth novel, Intermezzo, as well as Rachel Kushner’s Creation Lake. Cummins noted other forthcoming titles by big names – Pat Barker, Roddy Doyle, Rumaan Alam, Sarah Manguso – and though he hasn’t read them yet, his “sneaking suspicion” is that the judges will have been kept busy by some 2023 novels … He would “strongly tip” Francis Spufford’s “counterfactual caper” Cahokia Jazz and Samantha Harvey’s “beautiful” short novel Orbital, set over a day in the life of six astronauts. (He added that “for a long-range punt” you could do a lot worse than either Orbital or Praiseworthy to win.) Dawoor would be glad to see Choice by Neel Mukherjee on the longlist. “I was impressed by its intellectual robustness, its formal daring, and the sheer breadth of its concerns,” he said. “It’s about parenting, sustainable and ethical living, survival, publishing, the human and the non-human Other, empire, capitalism, and so much more. It also features a cow named Gauri, who is very, very endearing.” All Fours by Miranda July would be a “fantastically fun” addition to the longlist, “which can often feel a little sombre and sober,” Donkor said. July’s second novel “playfully asks questions about the nature of desire and what ‘selfishness’ really means within the contexts of marriage and middle life.” Tania James’s Lootwould likewise “inject some fun and thrill”, said Dawoor. Caoilinn Hughes’s The Alternatives – from indie publisher Oneworld, which is also behind the 2023 winner Prophet Song by Paul Lynch – could make an appearance, Cummins suggested. And as it’s a US election year, keep an eye out for debut novel Great Expectations by Vinson Cunningham, about an Obama campaign staffer, he added. Talking of debuts, he also said that Rosalind Brown’s Practice, about a student writing an essay, “is the kind of Marmite book you want to argue over, which might just see it through to the longlist”. And “at least one novel always comes out of nowhere: why not Clinical Intimacy, from Munich-based writer Ewan Gass, an enigmatic, formally unsettling debut on the subject of sex work?” Dawoor adds Tommy Orange’s Wandering Stars, a multigenerational story of a Native American community, to the table. “This is a novel that asks: what happens when the past intrudes upon the present, and refuses to leave? What avenues of healing are possible in the wake of colonisation, genocide and personal ill-luck?” He also put forward Anita Desai’s Rosaritaand Ruthvika Rao’s “literary thunderclap”, The Fertile Earth. He is expecting to see Kaliane Bradley’s The Ministry of Time, Ingrid Persaud’s The Lost Love Songs of Boysie Singhand Andrew O’Hagan’s Caledonian Road. Meanwhile, for Cummins, other candidates could be Joseph O’Neill’s Godwin, Yael van der Wouden’s The Safekeepand Helen Oyeyemi’s Parasol Against the Axe. All will be revealed on Tuesday! | 