Judging this year’s Booker prize taught me our humanity cannot be captured by algorithms and data | Rebecca Liu

As the demand for information and transparency about our lives increases, these brilliant books dealt with shadows, mystery, privacy and intimacy The first box of submissions for the 2026 Booker prize arrived by courier a few days before Christmas. As I made my way through 19 books over the next six weeks (they start you off at a leisurely pace) I spotted a theme: God is back. In novels set from antiquity to our contemporary world, from romances to comedies to thrillers, characters reached f