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The Man Booker prize longlist has been announced and includes a graphic novel

The Man Booker prize longlist has been announced and includes – for the first time – a graphic novel.

Nick Drnaso’s Sabrina, which tells the story of a missing girl in the age of 24-hour news, is one of 13 titles competing for the £50,000 (Dh240,800) prize.

“Given the changing shape of fiction, it was only a matter of time before a graphic novel was included on the Man Booker [prize] longlist,” the judges said. “Sabrina makes demands on the reader in precisely the way all good fiction does.”

A number of big-name authors, including Julian Barnes, Peter Carey and Alan Hollinghurst, have been overlooked in favour of stylistically experimental novels such as poet Robin Robertson’s debut The Long Take, which mixes verse and prose, and Esi Edugyan’s Washington Black, which the judges described as “extremely imaginative”.

Three other debut novels – The Water Cure by Sophie Mackintosh; In Our Mad and Furious City by Guy Gunaratne; and Everything Under by Daisy Johnson – also made the list. At 27, Johnson is the joint youngest author on the list, alongside Sally Rooney, who wrote Normal People, a “very intimate character study of two young people trying to figure out how to love each other”.

Michael Ondaatje is the only previous winner to have made the list. Warlight, Ondaatje’s seventh novel, follows two siblings abandoned by their parents in the aftermath of the Second World War. It was described by the judges as “wonderfully atmospheric, beautifully paced, subtle storytelling”.

Chair of the judges Kwame Anthony Appiah said: “All of these books – which take in slavery, ecology, missing persons, inner-city violence, young love, prisons, trauma, race – capture something about a world on the brink.

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