Booklists, Author Visits and Interviews
Books Unlocked provides free copies of Booker Prize longlisted and shortlisted titles for participants to read, discuss and keep. We send out two lists every year for settings to choose from.
Books Unlocked Booklist 1 of 2026
This list was sent out in February/March 2026 and has 8 titles. Settings were allowed to choose two titles from this list, and up to 15 copies of each title.
Click on the book covers below to find out more from the publishers:
- My Name is Lucy Barton - Elizabeth Strout (Penguin - Viking)
- The Sisters Brothers - Patrick Dewitt (Granta)
- Brick Lane - Monica Ali (Doubleday)
- Such a Fun Age - Kiley Reid (Bloomsbury)
- Home Fire - Kamila Shamsie (Bloomsbury)
- The Sea - John Banville (Pan Macmillan)
- Trust - Hernan Diaz (Pan Macmillan)
- Shuggie Bain - Douglas Stuart (Pan Macmillan)
Buy the list and support our work
We've pulled together the titles for this year's Books Unlocked list ready for you to browse and buy on Bookshop.org - an online bookshop with a mission to financially support local, independent bookshops and charities.
Author Visits
Rachel Seiffert visited HMP Bronzefield and HMP Send to discuss her book The Dark Room, shortlisted for the 2001 Booker Prize, with the residents there.
National Prison Radio Interviews
Within our partnership with NPR, where Booker Prize novels are serialized in their 11pm slot, we also organize author interviews to explore the book further. The interview is recorded by NPR and then aired to roughly 80,000 people in custody across the UK. The latest interview was with Maddie Mortimer, the author of Maps of Our Spectacular Bodies.