The Sellout (2015) has been on my radar for about a year now. I'd seen a couple of people on Literary Twitter talking about it but I've yet to actually see a physical copy of it in any bookshops. I had almost forgotten about it until the longlist came about. So I read it first. 
 The Sellout is a satire about race in modern America. The novel begins with our nameless black narrator sitting before the Supreme Court. We soon discover (through oneiric but lucid prose) that he is being charged with owning a slave and segregating a school. Before you have a chance to do a double-take the narrator brings you back to his childhood. We discover that he grew up in the town formerly known as Dickens but the town is now disappearing, it barely even appears on maps anymore. Overwhelmed by a literal lack of place our narrator attempts to bring Dickens back from the ashes. In order to achieve this, he 'employs' one of Dickens' oldest residents and last remaining Little Rascal, Hominy, as his slave, a job that he is more than willing to do (he even insists on calling our narrator 'massa'). He will stop at nothing to bring Dickens back. 
 This is a very heavy book when you think about it. However, Beatty never lets you think about it because scattered between the paragraphs on the ethics of slavery and meditations on modern blackness are jokes. Lots of jokes. This novel about slavery and segregation is one of the funniest books I've read in years. However, I wouldn't go around advertising The Sellout as a 'comic novel'. Beatty himself has said that people are reading the jokes and forgetting what the book is actually about. I see the humour of this novel as a necessary antidote, like the porter telling dick jokes after the murder of Duncan. 
 Beatty's approach is brazen but brilliant. He will have you laughing and then a couple of seconds later you'll be thinking about why you are laughing. The Sellout is one of my favourite reads of the year thus far. It's one which plants itself into your frontal lobe and refuses to leave, like a satirical tumour. I'm scolding myself for putting this one off for a year and a half but now I'm calling shotgun on the bandwagon (if it hasn't already left).