PJE's Booker Blog

The 2019 Booker Prize Shortlist

2019-09-03T14:30:00.000+01:00

The Booker Prize shortlist was announced this morning and somehow it seems even heavier than the longlist:

Margaret Atwood - The Testaments (Vintage, Chatto & Windus)
Lucy Ellmann - Ducks, Newburyport (Galley Beggar Press)
Bernardine Evaristo - Girl, Woman, Other (Hamish Hamilton)
Chigozie Obioma - An Orchestra of Minorities (Little Brown)
Salman Rushdie - Quichotte (Jonathan Cape)
Elif Shafak - 10 Minutes 38 Seconds in This Strange World (Viking)

This year's chair of judges Hay Festival director Peter Florence said that the six books "teem with life, with a profound and celebratory humanity", while Gaby Wood, Literary Director of the Booker Prize Foundation, said the judges have found "a set of novels that is political, orchestral, fearless, felt. And now, by association, those six will be in fruitful conversation with one another.”

The bookies seem to be baffled by it. Ladbrokes make Lucy Ellmann's thousand-page monologue the 3/1 favourite, whereas William Hill have her as the 10/1 outsider and Chigozie Obioma the favourite at 7/4. Both are offering 4/1 against Margaret Atwood who I imagine will attract some interest from punters. Little is yet known about The Testaments, a sequel to The Handmaid's Tale, as it is not published until next week, and has been distributed on a need-to-read basis and subject to fierce non-disclosure agreements which may-or-may-not involve cattle-prods.

The £50,000 prize is now sponsored by Crankstart, a charitable foundation set up by Welsh-born Time-Magazine-journalist-turned-venture-capitalist-billionaire, Sir Michael Moritz and his wife, Harriet Heyman. The winner will be announced at the Guildhall in London on Monday 14th October.

Booker Prize Longlist 2019

2019-07-24T19:15:00.000+01:00

...and another reason I hate longlists, sorry, where was I? Anyway, I wrote this sitting in the kitchen sink. Well, almost. Tis hot here.

The 2019 Booker Prize longlist was revealed at midnight, and it's a heavyweight list:

Margaret Atwood (Canada)

The Testaments (Vintage, Chatto & Windus)

Kevin Barry (Ireland)

Night Boat to Tangier (Canongate Books)

Oyinkan Braithwaite (UK/Nigeria)

My Sister, The Serial Killer (Atlantic Books)

Lucy Ellmann (USA/UK)

Ducks, Newburyport (Galley Beggar Press)

Bernardine Evaristo (UK)

Girl, Woman, Other (Hamish Hamilton)

John Lanchester (UK)

The Wall (Faber & Faber)

Deborah Levy (UK)

The Man Who Saw Everything (Hamish Hamilton)

Valeria Luiselli (Mexico/Italy)

Lost Children Archive (4th Estate)

Chigozie Obioma (Nigeria)

An Orchestra of Minorities (Little Brown)

Max Porter (UK)

Lanny (Faber & Faber)

Salman Rushdie (UK/India)

Quichotte (Jonathan Cape)

Elif Shafak (UK/Turkey)

10 Minutes 38 Seconds in This Strange World (Viking)

Jeanette Winterson (UK)

Frankissstein (Jonathan Cape)

I say revealed at midnight, lots of book retailers were in the know for who knows how long, but hey make me try to get online in the middle of a hot night, why don't you?

The judges this year are chaired by Peter Florence, director of the Hay Festival. He is joined by Liz Calder, co-founder of Bloomsbury, the novelist and filmmaker Xiaolu Guo, writer and broadcaster Afua Hirsch, and the pianist and composer Joanna MacGregor. They read 151 novels.

I have only read two so far, but of those, Frankissstein would be my tip for the prize. It combines the historic with the futuristic, a lightness of touch with depth of intellect, and is outrageously funny. It's astonishing that Jeanette Winterson has not been longlisted for the Booker before now (as far as I can tell - longlists were not published before 2001.) Ali Smith's Spring ought to have been on the list as well, but it looks like she hasn't changed her mind about withdrawing her work from consideration.

The most literally heavyweight tome on this literary heavyweight list is supplied by the only American to make the cut: Lucy Ellmann, whose Ducks, Newburyport is a thousand page single-sentence stream of consciousness. She deserves some kind of prize just for the line "Super callous fragile racist sexist Nazi Potus" about a certain half-man-half-goldfish. As does everyone who manages to read it all.

I look forward to reading Sir Salman Rushdie 'reimagining' Don Quixote and Margaret Atwood's long-awaited sequel to The Handmaid's Tale - perhaps the literary publishing event of the year. Peter Florence described The Testaments as "terrifying and exhilarating.” Although we have a long wait to find out just how, as it will not be published until September 10th - a week after the announcement of the shortlist on Tuesday 3rd September.

The winner will be announced on Monday 14th October at an awards ceremony at London’s Guildhall.

In other Booker news Jokha Alharthi and translator Marilyn Booth won the £50,000 Man Booker International Prize 2019 for Celestial Bodies, published by the small Scottish publisher Sandstone Press. It was the last to be sponsored by the Man Group, with Silicon Valley venture capitalist Sir Michael Moritz and Harriet Heyman’s charitable foundation Crankstart taking over sponsorship of the Booker Prizes in a five-year deal.

Milkman delivers

2018-10-18T13:48:00.000+01:00

Would the Americans complete a hat-trick of Man Booker wins? That was the $64,000¹ question at London's Guildhall on Tuesday² night. And the answer was nay.

The £50,000 Man Booker Prize for Fiction 2018 was awarded to Anna Burns for her third novel Milkman (Faber & Faber) - making her the first writer from Northern Ireland to win the prize in this, its 50th anniversary year.

I was very impressed. Milkman offers insight into a divided community, explaining and exposing its parochial absurdities and the intimidation that sustains the divide. The lack of character names seemed clunky and annoyingly repetitive at first, but it is a device that helps the novel transcend a specific time or place. Names would place the characters on one side of the divide or the other. So ignore lazy blurbs describing it as a book set in Belfast in the 1970s, people in other divided communities around the world will recognize echoes of their situations as well.

The narrator is a young woman who likes to walk around with her head in a book - ususally a 19th century novel. This draws attention to herself in a society where you do not draw attention to yourself. Whether by 'reading-while-walking', or by being seen talking to someone you shouldn't be seen talking to. A community riddled with dangerous rumours and menacing groupthink. Pressure to conform. To be 'one of us' not 'one of them'. To obey arbitrary, unwritten, almost Gormenghastian rules.

In an interview for the official Man Booker website, Anna Burns explains that she "grew up in a place that was rife with violence, distrust and paranoia, and peopled by individuals trying to navigate and survive in that world as best as they could." Milkman conveys that with great style. As reviewer Claire Allfree put it: "If Beckett had written a prose poem about the Troubles, it would read a lot like this."

This year's judges (Kwame Anthony Appiah, Val McDermid, Leo Robson and Jacqueline Rose and Leanne Shapton) read 171 books - an absurd number - that's almost more than one per day - and are to be congratulated for finding Milkman and bringing it to all our attention.

For premature speculation about possible contenders for the 2019 prize keep an eye on: https://www.goodreads.com/list/show/126184.Man_Booker_Prize_Eligible_2019

¹ Approximately. More like $65,000 unless the pound drops even further.
² Apologies for the delay. Sometimes I think the world is spinning a bit too fast for me to cling on.

2018 Man Booker Prize Shortlist

2018-09-21T14:55:00.001+01:00

The shortlist for the Man Booker Prize always seems like a bit of an anticlimax now that the longlist is revealed two months earlier, stealing all the excitement. But, for the record, here is the 2018 shortlist:

Milkman by Anna Burns (UK) (Faber & Faber)
Washington Black by Esi Edugyan (Canada) (Serpent’s Tail)
Everything Under by Daisy Johnson (UK) (Jonathan Cape)
The Mars Room by Rachel Kushner (USA) (Jonathan Cape)
The Overstory by Richard Powers (USA) (Willian Heinemann)
The Long Take by Robin Robertson (UK) (Picador)

"All of our six finalists are miracles of stylistic invention. In each of them the language takes centre stage," said Kwame Anthony Appiah, this year's chair of the judges. "And, as is traditional, we have dropped the favourites," he didn't go on to say.

With the omission of Michael Ondaatje, there are no previous winners on the list, so there will be a 'new name on the trophy'. Esi Edugyan is the only author to have even been shortlisted before (for Half Blood Blues in 2011). And at the age of 27, Daisy Johnson has become the youngest person to be shortlisted (and the first to be born in the 1990's).

The winner will be announced at The Guildhall, London, on Tuesday 16th October. Let's hope there's not too much booing and food-throwing if an American wins for the third year in a row, just four years after they became eligible. The night before BBC4 will broadcast a documentary entitled "Barneys, Books and Bust Ups: 50 Years of the Booker Prize" which is described as "a tale of bruised egos and bickering judges".

2018 Man Booker Prize Longlist

2018-07-24T13:14:00.000+01:00

The longlist for the 2018 Man Booker Prize has been announced, with none of the usual suspects - and for the first time ever it includes a graphic novel (Sabrina by Nick Drnaso). The full list is:

Snap by Belinda Bauer (UK) (Bantam Press)

Milkman by Anna Burns (UK) (Faber & Faber)

Sabrina by Nick Drnaso (USA) (Granta Books)

Washington Black by Esi Edugyan (Canada) (Serpent’s Tail)

In Our Mad And Furious City by Guy Gunaratne (UK) (Tinder Press)

Everything Under by Daisy Johnson (UK) (Jonathan Cape)

The Mars Room by Rachel Kushner (USA) (Jonathan Cape)

The Water Cure by Sophie Mackintosh (UK) (Hamish Hamilton)

Warlight by Michael Ondaatje (Canada) (Jonathan Cape)

The Overstory by Richard Powers (USA) (William Heinemann)

The Long Take by Robin Robertson (UK) (Picador)

Normal People by Sally Rooney (Ireland) (Faber & Faber)

From A Low And Quiet Sea by Donal Ryan (Ireland) (Doubleday Ireland)

"Every one of these books is wildly distinctive" according to the chair of this year's jury - the philosopher Kwame Anthony Appiah. The other judges are the crime writer Val McDermid, graphic novelist Leanne Shapton and critics Leo Robson and Jacqueline Rose. They read 171 books - the most ever submitted. The shortlist will be revealed on September 20th, with the £50,000 prize winner revealed on October 16th at London’s Guildhall.

"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," Appiah said. In other words it's a depressing dystopian list which, following on from the decision of the judges of the Bollinger Everyman Wodehouse Prize for Comic Fiction to withhold that prize because none of the novels made them all laugh, begs the question: is literary humour dead?

The bookies' favourite will surely be Michael Ondaatje, the only previous winner of the prize on the list, having shared the 1992 Booker prize with Barry Unsworth. "For a short time," he said, "I was a legend in my own lunchtime". Ondaatje also won the public vote to choose the 'Golden' Man Booker Prize earlier this month. The English Patient had been Kamila Shamsie's choice from the 1990s winners. The other shortlisted titles were: In a Free State by V.S Naipaul (chosen by Robert McCrum from he first decade of the prize); Moon Tiger by Penelope Lively (chosen by Lemn Sissay from the 1980s); Wolf Hall by Hilary Mantel (chosen by Simon Mayo from the 2000s); and Lincoln in the Bardo by George Saunders (chosen by Hollie McNish from this decade).

Also since I last got around to blogging, the Polish author Olga Tokarczuk (along with translator Jennifer Croft) won the 2018 Man Booker International Prize for Flights, and the judges for the 2019 Man Booker International Prize have been announced.

As always there are many excellent novels that didn't make the longlist. I am most disappointed by the omission of Travelling In A Strange Land by David Park - a beautiful, touching novel which, if you haven't already read it, should be on your Christmas list. Unless this miserable burning world ends before then.

The Golden Man Booker Prize

2018-02-17T15:21:00.000+00:00

2018 marks the 50th anniversary of the first Booker Prize and as part of the celebrations The Booker Prize Foundation are awarding a 'Golden Man Booker Prize'. All of the previous 51 winning titles (there were joint winners in 1974 and 1992) will be reassessed to gauge which has best “stood the test of time, remaining relevant to readers today”.

Five judges will pick the best winner from each decade and their shortlist will be announced at the Hay Festival on May 26th. This 'Golden Five' will then be put to a public vote on the official Man Booker website and the winner announced during the Man Booker 50 Festival which takes place on the weekend of the 6th-8th July at London's Southbank Centre.

Of the five judges, the BBC Radio 2 broadcaster (and writer of teenage fiction) Simon Mayo has the easiest job: picking the best winner from the 2000s which, as we all know, is Wolf Hall. The poet Lemn Sissay will be considering the 1980s winners, which includes Salman Rushdie's Booker-of-Bookers champion Midnight's Children and my favourite winner The Remains of the Day by Kazuo Ishiguro.

The writer and editor Robert McCrum will consider the first twelve winners (1969-79), while poet Hollie McNish will choose from the eight most recent (since 2010). Novelist Kamila Shamsie might have the most awkward decision to make, as she will be revisiting the 1990s - the decade in which Booker judges failed even to shortlist all the most memorable titles (Regeneration, Birdsong, The Shipping News, Trainspotting, A Suitable Boy, Captain Corelli's Mandolin, Bridget Jones's Diary, Enduring Love, etc.)

I think the big-hitters, the ones to beat, are probably:

In A Free State - VS Naipaul (1971)
Midnight's Children - Salman Rushdie (1981)
The God Of Small Things - Arundhati Roy (1997)
Wolf Hall - Hilary Mantel (2009)
A Brief History of Seven Killings - Marlon James (2015)

If it were up to me, rather than re-rewarding a previous winner, there would be a prize for the best runner-up. My 'Silver Five' would look like this:

Impossible Object - Nicholas Mosley (1969)
The Handmaid's Tale - Margaret Atwood (1986)
Quarantine - Jim Crace (1997)
Unless - Carol Shields (2002)
Darkmans - Nicola Barker (2007)

Yes, I've cheated there, but I don't think anything from the 2010s would stand much chance in that company. And, obviously, in a public vote, The Handmaid's Tale would win by a landslide, so perhaps I should choose Flaubert's Parrot instead. Unless has one of the greatest first paragraphs I have ever read, and maybe if it had won the Booker, the whole #MeToo phenomenon might have happened years ago.

Before the Golden Booker though, there is the longlist for the Man Booker International Prize which will be announced on March 12th, followed by the shortlist one month later, and the winner on 22nd May.

The longlist for the 2018 Man Booker Prize itself will be revealed later in July, with this year's judges being philosopher Kwame Anthony Appiah (chair), alongside crime writer Val McDermid, graphic novelist Leanne Shapton and critics Leo Robson and Jacqueline Rose. As per usual the shortlist will be revealed in September, with the £50,000 prize winner revealed on October 16th.

George Saunders wins the 2017 Man Booker Prize

2017-10-18T16:10:00.000+01:00

The £50,000 Man Booker Prize for Fiction 2017 was awarded to George Saunders last night for his first full length goddamn novel Lincoln in the Bardo (Bloomsbury). A field geophysicist from Amarillo, Texas, who quit "swimming in [...] monkey shit [...] to try and be Kerouac II", Saunders has been well-known in America for twenty years thanks to his humorous (and often dystopic) short stories. Lincoln in the Bardo is the “Scary Artistic Project He Desperately Longed to Attempt”.

This means that the prize has been won by an American writer for the second successive year, only four years after the prize was opened up to writers from outside the Commonwealth. Interestingly, that decision to open up the prize was seen as being a response to the inauguration of the Folio Prize in 2014, which included Americans - and short-story collections. And who won that first Folio Prize? George Saunders for his short story collection Tenth of December. Of that book, Saunders told Slate.com that at least three of the stories were intended to be novels, "until they came to their senses. That seems to be the definition of 'novel' for me: a story that hasn’t yet discovered a way to be brief."

Lincoln in the Bardo depicts the events of the night Abraham Lincoln's 11-year-old son Willie died (February 22nd, 1862) in a genuinely innovative and, ultimately, moving way using quotations from historical works (some real, some fictional, some amusingly contradictory) and a myriad of spectral perspectives (apparently there are 166 different voices heard in the novel). Despite such a frightening-sounding conceit it is beautifully readable - as Saunders told The Guardian: "the writer doesn’t need to throw a party in every sentence". Although I disagree with the decision to open the prize to Americans, there is no doubt that the judges have picked the right book: it is a 'fittingly dazzling' winner.

For premature speculation about who the contenders for the 2018 prize might be keep an eye on: https://www.goodreads.com/list/show/115479.Man_Booker_Prize_Eligible_2018

And let's hope that Ali Smith isn't serious about not submitting her books for the prize in future.

2017 Man Booker Prize Shortlist

2017-09-13T14:55:00.001+01:00

The surprising shortist for the 2017 Man Booker Prize has been announced, it looks like this:

Paul Auster - 4 3 2 1
Emily Fridlund - History of Wolves
Mohsin Hamid - Exit West
Fiona Mozley - Elmet
George Saunders - Lincoln in the Bardo
Ali Smith - Autumn

My favourite band are releasing a single next month, for the first time in many years. It makes me want to bang my head against a wall - not in a heavy metal way, but in a why-have-they-done-that-it-is-the-worst-song-on-the-album way. I suspect many people will feel the same about this shortlist, culled from what was probably the strongest Booker longlist ever. There will also be murmurs of 'told you so' with regard to it being 50% American.

I didn't make a prediction this year, but if I had it would probably have been the same as this one: https://www.thenational.ae/arts-culture/books/the-booker-shortlist-2017-who-ll-be-on-it-1.627345 - almost entirely wrong. It is as if the judges looked at the bookies' odds, and the predictions and preferences of bloggers, and shortlisted the least fancied ones. The exceptions being George Saunders' Lincoln In The Bardo and Ali Smith's Autumn.

George Saunders will now be the clear favourite. Lincoln In The Bardo is a typically kooky account of the night of Abraham Lincoln's son's death featuring the points of view of various (ex-)people in limbo. Truly novel, and much more readable than any attempts to describe it.

I read Ali Smith's Autumn when it came out last year, and I have to confess to remembering nothing about it. I do love Ali Smith's writing though so I will give it another read. I might re-read Exit West as well for the same reason, although I felt the surreal (magic realist?) device of doorways from one part of the world to another weakened it's impact. I preferred How To Get Filthy Rich In Rising Asia.

Many column inches will be devoted to Fiona Mozley the "29-year-old" (one of the youngest people ever to be shortlisted) "bookshop worker" (she works in the Little Apple Bookshop on York) and "PhD student" (she is doing a doctorate on medieval English forests as 'forbidden landscapes' at the University of York). I am not surprised to see her make the shortlist. Elmet is a memorable debut with a terrific climax. On the other hand I was slightly baffled by the inclusion of Emily Fridlund's History of Wolves on the longlist, and absolutely astonished to see it reach the shortlist. Not a bad book, but why has it been chosen ahead of so many other brilliant ones?

This may not the shortlist anyone expected, and the omission of such strong (and other-award-winning novels) make it appear weaker than it might have been, but it includes three or four authors I really love, so I am not complaining. (Sorry, did it sound like I was? I have a touch of toothache, please blame any grouchiness on that.)

I say three or four because the jury is out on one of them. The only book on the shortlist I haven't finished yet is Paul Auster's magnum opus 4 3 2 1. It is compelling reading, but at times so detailed that I want to yell: 'stop trying to be Dickens!' Effectively four books in one - or three books and a novella, if you want a spoiler - it traces four possible life-paths of one character, the same age as the author. I have been taking a break from it, five hundred pages in, so still a long way to go. If the judges (author Sarah Hall, artist Tom Phillips, travel writer Colin Thubron, literary critic Lila Azam Zanganeh and their chair: crossbench peer Baroness Lola Young) really have read it twice, and are going to read it a third time, they must really, really love it. Or they just really love reading, which is as it should be.

2017 Man Booker Prize Longlist - the strongest ever?

2017-07-28T00:53:00.000+01:00

The longlist for the 2017 Man Booker Prize was revealed yesterday, and what an impressive list it is:

4 3 2 1 by Paul Auster (US) (Faber & Faber)
Days Without End by Sebastian Barry (Ireland) (Faber & Faber)
History of Wolves by Emily Fridlund (US) (Weidenfeld & Nicolson)
Exit West by Mohsin Hamid (Pakistan-UK) (Hamish Hamilton)
Solar Bones by Mike McCormack (Ireland) (Canongate)
Reservoir 13 by Jon McGregor (UK) (4th Estate)
Elmet by Fiona Mozley (UK) (JM Originals)
The Ministry Of Utmost Happiness by Arundhati Roy (India) (Hamish Hamilton)
Lincoln in the Bardo by George Saunders (US) (Bloomsbury)
Home Fire by Kamila Shamsie (UK-Pakistan) (Bloomsbury)
Autumn by Ali Smith (UK) (Hamish Hamilton)
Swing Time by Zadie Smith (UK) (Hamish Hamilton)
The Underground Railroad by Colson Whitehead (US) (Fleet)

The judges this year are the novelist Sarah Hall, the artist Tom Phillips, the travel writer Colin Thubron, literary critic Lila Azam Zanganeh and, in the chair, Baroness Lola Young, a crossbench peer. They considered 154 novels: 144 submissions and another ten that they called in.

They will surely have a difficult job whittling it down to a shortlist of six - I can't really complain about also-rans this year, can I? Their list pits some big-prize-winning novels against each other: the winner of the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction (The Underground Railroad), the Goldsmiths Prize winner (Solar Bones), and the winner of the Walter Scott Prize and Costa Book of the Year (Days Without End).

Solar Bones consists of a single, two-hundred-page sentence, Home Fire is a contemporary reimagining of Sophocles' Antigone and the 880-page hardback edition of Paul Auster's 4321 weighs enough to kill a small child if it falls off a shelf. So it is a heavyweight list, and also very diverse - although Baroness Young claimed they only noticed that afterwards. A happenstance which has occurred almost every year since I began following the Booker in the early 1990's.

The only downside to such a strong list is that there are very few surprises - except perhaps the inclusion of a novel that isn't scheduled for publication until November (Elmet by Fiona Mozley) Did somebody move the goalposts?

The shortlist will be announced on September 13th, and the winner of the £50,000 prize on October 17th at the traditional posh bingo 'do' at London's Guildhall, which will be broadcast live on the BBC. Let's hope they don't blow the whole budget on a male presenter.

By the way, thanks to paddyjoe for pointing out that Helen Dunmore was longlisted once (in 2010). Occasionally I do think about checking my facts properly before I post, but then Donald Trump pops up on TV to remind me that facts don't matter any more anyway.

Waiting For The Cut

2017-07-25T15:11:00.000+01:00

Well, the cunctation had to stop sometime, so here I am again.

Since I last got round to posting we have lost some more fine writers, including David Storey who won for Saville in 1976 and Nicholas Mosley - who should have won the first Booker Prize in 1969 with Impossible Object - a piece of mind-bending meta-fiction that was way ahead of its time. (So far ahead that if it had been published this year it would be my favourite for the prize.) He also quit the judging panel in 1991 when the other judges refused to put Allan Massie’s The Sins of the Fathers on the shortlist, complaining that their choices lacked ideas.

Helen Dunmore also passed away, sadly this means that Birdcage Walk is no longer eligible, as the prize cannot be awarded posthumously. Although it probably makes no difference because, shockingly, she had never even been longlisted.

And - stop me if you have heard this before - A Horse Walks Into A Bar by David Grossman won the Man Booker International Prize. He and translator Jessica Cohen sharing the £50,000 prize.

So, with the 2017 Man Booker longlist due on Thursday, it is time to dig out the old crystal ball. Except that we have barely the vaguest idea which 150 books the panel will have read, and judges have ventured so far off the beaten track in recent years, what's the point? So let me tell you what I would pick...

Mohsin Hamid (Exit West) and Ali Smith (Autumn) would be on my list. They are two of my favourite authors, and their latest novels did not disappoint but, to be honest, they haven't seared themselves on my memory.

I also had high hopes for Reservoir 13 by Jon McGregor, and I suspect it could be a strong contender judging by the positive critical reception, but I wish it had been called 'Reservoir 8'. Each of the thirteen chapters depicts a yearsworth of events in a village following a girl's disappearance, and it went on a few years too long for me.

I am currently enjoying Neel Mukherjee's A State of Freedom but, as Andrew Motion pointed out in his review in The Guardian, it does have a lot of "flabbily padded phrases". It reminds me of a comment my English teacher left on an essay many years ago: "Some very intelligent use of a Thesaurus" he said, probably sarcastically.

Arundhati Roy's long-awaited second novel The Ministry of Utmost Happiness is a strong contender, but I'm afraid I have grown weary from reading so many of these epic, formulaic, literary-genre novels. (Others from recent years that spring to mind include Do Not Say We Have Nothing by Madeleine Thien and The Lives of Others by Neel Mukherjee.)

Jaroslav Kalfar's debut novel Spaceman of Bohemia manages the rare feat of being both literary and science fiction, and is as good as many previous longlisted titles. It would definitely be on my list, as would A Natural by Ross Raisin, which is an excellent examination of what life might be like for a secretly gay young footballer in Britain today.

Talking of Britain today brings me to Anthony Cartwright's 'Brexit novel': The Cut. You may have heard of Ford Madox Ford's Page 99 test, where you read page 99 to gauge the quality of a book. The Cut passes that test with flying colours because pages 99-101 contain a bravura riff on tiredness that brilliantly captures the post-crash zero-hours struggle of many people in Brexit Britain:

He lies on the bed, tired, shouldn't be this tired. All of them the same. He hopes his mother has a sleep this afternoon. Tiredness has worked through everything, like the damp that warps the walls and the back fence and the wallpaper in the bathroom, has worked its way through the hills themselves, the undermining of the tunnels and great caverns that shift below them, slowly, not in human time, bent everything out of shape in the end. But the tiredness is human, that much is certain, and the damage done.

[...]

People are tired. Tired of clammed-up factory gates, but not even them any more, because look where they are working now, digging trenches to tat out the last of whatever metal was left. Tired of change, tired of the world passing by, tired of other people getting things that you and people like you had made for them, tired of being told you were no good, tired of being told that what you believed to be true was wrong, tired of being told to stop complaining, tired of being told what to eat, what to throw away, what to do and what not to do, what was right and wrong when you were always in the wrong. Tired of supermarket jobs and warehouse jobs and jobs guarding shopping centres. Work had always worn people out, the heat of the furnaces, the clang of the iron, but this is tiredness of a different order, tiredness that a rest will not cure, like a plague eating away at them all.

It's worth longlisting for that alone.

Also near the top of my longlist would be An English Guide to Birdwatching by a Nicholas Royle. I found it mind-boggling, very funny, and the most surprising novel I have read since Care of Wooden Floors by Will Wiles. But ask yourself whether you can trust the judgement of someone who, if asked to choose the judges for next year, would mischievously invite both Nicholas Royles?

Finally, the book I most want to see on the longlist is H(a)ppy by the incomparable Nicola Barker. I hope to read H(a)ppy in the next few weeks, and if I end up putting it off in order to read other stuff that the judges have longlisted then heaven help the other stuff.

RIP John Berger

2017-01-06T13:45:00.000+00:00

I was in bed watching Ethel and Ernest die on Monday night when I heard that John Berger had passed away at the age of 90. Oh, the pain of living in the present world. He was the most humane writer of our times. I'm not sure who my favourite living writer is now. It is sad when that happens. The last time for me was when Muriel Spark died in 2006.

When Berger won the Booker Prize in 1972 for his novel "G", he (in)famously gave half the prize money to the Black Panther movement (although they were no longer active) in protest at the prize sponsors' exploitation of workers in the Caribbean. The other half he used to to write a much better book: A Seventh Man - in which, with photographer Jean Mohr, he depicted the lives of migrant workers in Europe. A book more people should have read. A book more people should read.

As is King: A Street Story - one of very few books I re-read (often around New Year for some reason) and one, you may have noticed, I mention at every opportunity. I was very disappointed that it wasn't shortlisted for the Booker Prize in 1999. (Come to think of it I am disappointed it didn't win him the Nobel Prize for Literature. Perhaps he should have sung it?) Maybe the Black Panther thing made him persona non grata, although he was longlisted for From A To X in 2008.

One of my favourite living writers, Ali Smith, says of him that "a few minutes with Berger and a better world, a better outcome, wasn’t fantasy or imaginary, it was impetus – possible, feasible, urgent and clear. It wasn’t that another world was possible; it was that this world, if we looked differently, and responded differently, was differently possible."

That better world looks less possible now, but maybe he has found it.

RIP John Berger

Meanwhile, the judges for the 2017 Man Booker Prize were announced just before Christmas, they are: Baroness Lola Young (chair); the travel writer Colin Thubron, whose novel To The Last City was longlisted for the prize in 2002; novelist Sarah Hall (who was shortlisted for The Electric Michelangelo in 2004 and longlisted for How To Paint A Dead Man in 2009); artist Tom Phillips; and literary critic Lila Azam Zanganeh. Their longlist will be revealed in July, the shortlist in September, and the winner announced on October 17th at London's Guildhall.

Man Booker's American Sellout

2016-10-25T23:20:00.002+01:00

Paul Beatty has won the 2016 Man Booker Prize for his novel The Sellout - becoming the first American to win the prize, which was only open to writers from Commonwealth countries (and the Republic of Ireland) until the rules were changed in 2014.

Remarkably it gives small independent publisher Oneworld their second consecutive Booker Prize triumph.

The Sellout is his fourth novel, following The White Boy Shuffle (1996), Tuff (2000), and Slumberland (2008). It is set in a ghetto of Los Angeles called Dickens that has been removed from the map - a state of affairs a black man called Me decides to correct, only to find himself in the Supreme Court charged with violating the Thirteenth Amendment by "owning a slave" and reintroducing segregation.

Even though I stood to win a few bob if Madeleine Thien won the prize, I am delighted the judges made such a daring choice. It's always good to see prize judges rewarding contemporary, political, humorous books, because there aren't enough of them. And as Amanda Foreman (the chair of this year's judges) said at the awards ceremony in London's Guildhall, The Sellout is "painfully funny". In her speech she also quoted fantasy author Ursula Le Guin: "the imagination is truly the enemy of bigotry and dogma."

Paul Beatty is clearly a lovely guy as well as a brilliant writer. He is a good choice for the first American winner of the prize - worth £50,000 (which, despite the fall in value of sterling is still worth at least as many dollars as there are n-words in his book...well, just about.)

The judges (Amanda Foreman, Olivia Williams, David Harsent, Abdulrazak Gurnah and Jon Day) read 155 novels and chose a shortlist of six books in which almost all the narrators are untrustworthy, saying they were looking for books that “take risks with language and form”, and that "writers work best when they are exploring at the outer limits of what is traditional, acceptable or conventional."

There is some consolation for Madeleine Thien, because Do Not Say We Have Nothing has just been awarded the Canadian Governor-General’s Literary Award for English-language fiction. The jury for that award describing it as “an elegant, nuanced and perfectly realized novel that, fugue-like, presents the lives of individuals, collectives, and generations caught in the complexities of history.”

I will leave you with this recurring bit of trivia: ten of the last eighteen Booker prizes have been won by the shortlisted author whose name came first alphabetically. Definitely worth checking out the new books by Naomi Alderman and Sebastian Barry then.

The fun, but not very predictive, list of runners and riders for next year's Man Booker prize is up-and-running at:

Man_Booker_Prize_Eligible_2017

Sadly it looks like GoodReads is trying to bury Listopia, so it may not be as busy as it has been in recent years.

The 2016 Man Booker Prize for Fiction - Shortlist

2016-09-13T15:03:00.000+01:00

Here it is then, the shortlist for the 2016 Man Booker Prize:

Paul Beatty - The Sellout (Oneworld)

Deborah Levy - Hot Milk (Hamish Hamilton)

Graeme Macrae Burnet - His Bloody Project (Contraband)

Ottessa Moshfegh - Eileen (Jonathan Cape)

David Szalay - All That Man Is (Jonathan Cape)

Madeleine Thien - Do Not Say We Have Nothing (Granta)

Interestingly, the only three BME authors on the longlist now make up 50% of the shortlist, which is also 50-50 male-female. That gender divide feels very stark to me. As in the world of politics, the centre ground seems to have become uninhabitable - the favoured books are either extremely masculine or very feminist.

According to the chair of the judges, Dr. Amanda Foreman, "the final six reflect the centrality of the novel in modern culture", which is news to me.

In moving from the longlist to this shortlist, the judges have eliminated seven books, including six of the eight-and-a-half that I have already read. Memo to self: ignore the longlist next year, you know you want to.

I didn't get round to Eileen by Ottessa Moshfegh which, from the reviews I saw, I assumed to be one of the also-rans. I also didn't fancy His Bloody Project by Graeme Macrae Burnet because books about historical murders combine two genres I am not keen on, and I fear it might be as tedious as Arthur & George.

It's possible therefore that I might be blindsided by those, as I was with Marlon James' A Brief History of Seven Killings last year. It is also possible that the judges will be contentious enough to give the prize to a profanatory satire or a book of short stories, but I still think the choice is between Deborah Levy and Madeleine Thien.

The six shortlisted authors each receive £2,500 plus 'a specially bound edition of their book' (let's hope they never have to flog that on eBay). The £50,000 winner will be announced at London's Guildhall on Tuesday 25th October. Some of the ceremony will be broadcast one of the BBC's lesser channels and there will be a special Man Booker Prize edition of Artsnight on BBC2 the previous Saturday.

As far as I know, there is no truth in the rumour that from 2017 coverage of the prize will be moving to Channel 4 as 'The Great British Book Off' presented by former autobiography-of-a-monkey-longlisting-Booker-judge Sue Perkins.

Some thoughts on the 2016 Manhood Booker Prize longlist

2016-09-12T14:57:00.001+01:00

I used the n-word a lot when I was fifteen. I had to: we were made to study The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn for English Literature O-Level. Years later I was much amused to discover English literature students in America were being made to read How Late It Was, How Late by James Kelman (the controversial 1994 Booker Prize winning f-fest about a blind drunk Glaswegian). I mention this because I suspect the n-word appears far more often in Paul Beatty's The Sellout than in Huckleberry Finn. (Surely somewhere there is a proper journalist counting exactly how many times for a shock-horror-headline.)

Beatty is perfectly entitled to use the n-word but, surprisingly, it can be found in several other novels on the longlist. Presumably those authors believe that since they are writing historical fiction, and that is the sort of language their characters would have used, they are entitled too. I am not so sure.

I enjoyed The Sellout. I love satire. I suppose I am more of a cynic than a critic. I'm glad the judges introduced me to this book and I hope they shortlist it, but I don't think it is quite funny enough or, bizarre as it may sound, angry enough to be truly great. And it would need to be truly great to win the prize, because it would be far and away the most controversial winner ever.

"Fuck plot and fuck story and fuck the way one thing fits to another and fuck cause and effect, because there wasn't none, and if there was we didn't see much of it", says a character in Hystopia by David Means, which is set in the Year of Hate. (That's an American Year of Hate, rather than Brexit Britain 2016.)

Dripping with testosterone, life is too short for this massive pool of wank. When I reached page one hundred I felt I deserved a medal. Kurt Vonnegut has a lot to answer for. I would have voted for Donald Trump if he promised to make it stop. To think I could have been re-reading Catch-22 with the Guardian's reading group.

The reviewer in The Guardian described Hystopia as "a novel that uses extreme violence as the hook to keep you reading." They could have said the same about The North Water by Ian McGuire - a book that is more of an Ice Station Zebra-wannabe than the new Moby Dick. The type of historical adventure that pings the Booker radar every few years - eg The Thousand Autumns of Jacob De Zoet, English Passengers, Jamrach's Menagerie etc. - only nastier. The sort of book 'shitwick' Brexit voters in Ian McGuire's hometown of Hull, wallowing in the gory good-old-days where political correctness has no jurisdiction, and you can call a spade a spade, will enjoy.

At one point we are told that: "the most important questions are the ones we can't hope to answer with words. Words are like toys: they amuse and educate us for a time, but when we come to manhood, we should give them up."

Oh, manhood. Put it away.

Wyl Menmuir's The Many is the most hallucinatory novel I've read since Marianne Dreams by Catherine Storr and could add some creepy colour to the shortlist. The meaning of the title is a puzzle to many. I wonder if it is a coincidence that 'man' is most of the title? Because the most astonishing thing about The Many, is how womany it isn't. Orphan protagonists are a common trope in children's fiction because it is convenient for authors to get the parents out of the way, regrettably many male authors seem to adopt the same tactic with regard to female characters. At the end of The Many, I found the absence of Timothy's wife astounding - it begs a whole 'nother story.

A story of women sidelined or missing altogether in book after book. In 2016. Anyone thinking of applying The Bechdel Test to this longlist needn't bother. This is a man's man's Man Booker Prize. If The Baileys Prize didn't exist it would be necessary to invent it. And I haven't even mentioned David Szalay's All That Man Is yet!

"Sometimes I worry about my attitude to women" one of Szalay's believably awful male characters says at one point - or was it the author, talking to himself? I will give him the benefit of the doubt and assume that All That Man Is is a knowing critique of 21st century manhood.

There are female characters in J.M. Coetzee's The Schooldays of Jesus but - spoiler alert - sometimes men do very bad things to women in his novels.

So, having read have about eight and a half of the books on the longlist, have I changed my mind about the rash prediction I made in my last post, where I tipped Madeleine Thien's Do Not Say We Have Nothing as the winner? No, but I did underestimate Hot Milk by Deborah Levy.

Deborah Levy is a terrific writer: unsettling; mystifying. According to Ron Charles in The Washington Post, "the seductive pleasure of Levy's prose stems from its layered brilliance." That explains that then.

The title alone deserves a prize. Two common words - how can they not have been put together as a title before? Isn't there a wrongness about hot milk? Surely milk is usually either cold or warm? I remember reading somewhere about a literature professor who spent a whole lecture unpacking and dissecting the first sentence of Great Expectations. There's probably a whole lecture to be had about the title Hot Milk.

The bookies are probably right to make it the favourite. This year's judges seem to have been drawn to wooziness, and it matches The Schooldays of Jesus and The Many for that without drifting too far into the Twilight Zone. I wasn't convinced by the ending, but I am convinced that Deborah Levy will win the Booker Prize sooner or later.

Do Not Say You Were Not Told

2016-08-03T14:30:00.000+01:00

Me again, sorry. I know, I know, nothing for six months then three blog posts in a fortnight - I should show more respect for the maintenance of headway.

I just want to clarify something. Last week, my instincts were that the longlist featured so many "also-rans" (books that aren't remotely likely to win) because the judges already knew what their winner was going to be. I just failed to see what that winner was. I wondered whether it might be JM Coetzee's new novel - an unknown quantity not due to be published until September (now brought forward to August 18th), but while looking deeper into the list, everything fell into place.

One book ticks all the boxes, rings all the right bells, and sparks like a firecracker: the subject matter, the excellent reviews, and the brilliant style exhibited by an extract which reminded me of The Last Samurai (superficially at least, but you know how it is with blogging - any excuse to plug one of your favourite books). A book I didn't think I was interested in, which I am now excited about.

So I want to make it clear that Madeleine Thien is not an also-ran. In fact I will go to the foot of our stairs if Do Not Say We Have Nothing doesn't win. I haven't been this convinced about a potential Booker winner since Wolf Hall in 2009.

Something else I see in my crystal ball is the Bookies whining about rumours and betting patterns as more and more people read it, as happened with Wolf Hall. Earlier today the silly sods at Paddy Power were offering the silly odds of 25-1 - although those odds have now shrunk a little.

You can read the first chapter at the Granta website: http://granta.com/do-not-say-extract/

2016 Man Booker Prize Longlist

2016-07-28T14:52:00.000+01:00

The longlist for the 2016 Man Booker Prize has been announced, and I'm sure the internet has ruined the Booker Prize. The judges clearly see all our speculations and expectations and swerve them. My first instinct was that the list looked a bit bloody, white, and American.

Paul Beatty - The Sellout (Oneworld)

J.M. Coetzee - The Schooldays of Jesus (Harvill Secker)

A.L. Kennedy - Serious Sweet (Jonathan Cape)

Deborah Levy - Hot Milk (Hamish Hamilton)

Graeme Macrae Burnet - His Bloody Project (Contraband)

Ian McGuire - The North Water (Scribner)

David Means - Hystopia (Faber & Faber)

Wyl Menmuir - The Many (Salt)

Ottessa Moshfegh - Eileen (Jonathan Cape)

Virginia Reeves - Work Like Any Other (Scribner)

Elizabeth Strout - My Name Is Lucy Barton (Viking)

David Szalay - All That Man Is (Jonathan Cape)

Madeleine Thien - Do Not Say We Have Nothing (Granta)

Five are American writers, who would not have been eligible for the prize before the rules were changed two years ago. Six are published by Penguin Random House (as you may have noticed if you received their newsletter). Nothing at all from Africa or Asia. The gender balance is even enough, but then would any Booker jury dare pick a mostly male longlist these days?

Still, maybe we shouldn't make the mistake of feeding the list through simplistic "diversity algorithms" as Sam Leith laments in The Spectator. Maybe we should count the bodies instead?

A triple murder was the inspiration behind His Bloody Project by Graeme Macrae Burnet, and Ian McGuire's The North Water sounds violent, cruel and bloody. Justine Jordan in The Guardian describes it as "so brilliantly nasty, one can barely tear one’s eyes from the page." A description that reminds me of the last two winners: The Narrow Road to the Deep North and A Brief History of Seven Killings.

I get the impression that brutal, abusive men, and the damage they wreak on the world, might be a common denominator of a number of these books. Maybe that is just the way of the world. Still.

Masculinity is certainly at the heart of David Szalay's All That Man Is. Some have questioned whether the nine separate segments, each focussing on a different man, constitutes a novel; but challenging the form of the novel should be part of the remit of a literary prize – and, as I have said before, the first Booker Prize in 1969 ought to have been won by Nicholas Mosley with a novel consisting of short stories. John Self was impressed by All That Man Is, and I’m sure that one day he will tell us how impressed he was by Impossible Object. Elizabeth Strout also won the Pulitzer Prize in 2009 with a "novel-in-stories" (Olive Kitteridge), and she makes the longlist with the minimalist My Name Is Lucy Barton, which will be the first longlisted title I read, almost as soon as I stop prattling on here.

The view from the bookface seems to be that this could be the most wide open Booker field ever, but just to be curmudgeonly about it (sorry, you will have to excuse me, I'm in a bad mood as my laptop crashed yesterday) this list reminds me of 2011 - not because of its "readability" - but because I see a lot of also-rans.

I had a hunch back then that the wide open longlist full of unknowns left the way clear for Julian Barnes, who was far and away the biggest name on the longlist, and this time around I'm wondering if the same applies to JM Coetzee.

Coetzee would figure highly in any list of the world's greatest living writers (even when no-one is quite sure who, or what, he is writing about) so if The Schooldays of Jesus is anywhere close to his best work he could be heading for a Booker hat-trick. Although Booker judges love to be unpredictable, and do usually drop the favourite at the shortlist stage...

Barnes' himself missed out this year, and I wonder whether that is because The Noise of Time was eclipsed by Madeleine Thien's Do Not Say We Have Nothing which has a similarly highbrow mix of 20th-century communist politics and classical music.

Apart from Coetzee, the only other nominee to have been longlisted before is Deborah Levy with her “hypnotic” “dreamscape” of a novel Hot Milk. I’m sure people don’t mean to imply that it is sleep-inducing. (Although comparisons to Virginia Woolf don’t help.)

I was pleasantly surprised to see AL Kennedy finally make the longlist with her eighth novel, Serious Sweet, and pleasantly stunned to see David Means' Hystopia there - I left it off my list of contenders because I thought it sounded too far-fetched for the Booker. Previously known for writing short-stories, Hystopia is Means' first novel and is one of four debuts on this list - the other 'unknown unknowns' being Work Like Any Other by Virginia Reeves, Ottessa Moshfegh's Eileen and The Many by Wyl Menmuir: whereof I must be silent.

If most of the longlist are also-rans, then they sound like very interesting ones. Not least The Sellout by Paul Beatty, which has been compared to Martin Amis – inevitable for a satirical novel whose protagonist has the surname Me. On reflection I am far more intrigued than disappointed by this list and I am going to assume that the omission of Megan Bradbury’s Everyone Is Watching was down to it not being among the 155 novels submitted to the judges: historian Amanda Foreman, actor Olivia Williams, author Abdulrazak Gurnah, writer and academic Jon Day, and the poet David Harsent.

The shortlist, which I rashly predict to be Coetzee, Levy, McGuire, Strout, Szalay, and Thien, will be announced on Tuesday 13th September. The £50,000 winner will be revealed at the traditional posh do in London's Guildhall on Tuesday 25th October.

Now let's all go to http://www.flipsnack.com/booker-prize/ and play with their Booker Predictor...

Many are read, few are chosen.

2016-07-25T23:01:00.000+01:00

Did I mention that I don't like the Man Booker Prize longlist? It means that instead of spending August reading books I hope the judges will choose, I spend it trying to get hold of the ones they did. It also means seven weeks less time to read some of the possible contenders, and that makes trying to predict which books will be on the longlist when it is announced on Wednesday (27th July) even more foolish, so please ignore any predictions I may accidentally make here.

I added as many possible contenders as I could to the list of eligible titles on Goodreads, which this year has ballooned to accommodate almost two hundred possibilities, but I have no doubt that the judges will descry a few more. There are a number of others that I couldn't squeeze on, including several highly-recommended books whose publication date on Goodreads suggested they were not eligible. I think if I were a publisher, getting the correct information onto the internet would be quite high on my to-do-list. Apologies to any authors who have been overlooked. Feel free to console yourself by getting your book repeatedly nominated for the Guardian's Not The Booker Prize by people who haven't read it.

We live in increasingly interesting times, where dystopias feel far too close to home, giving science fiction tropes more leverage than they have had for decades, something Val McDermid explored in her Artsnight programme this week. Which brings me to the old bugbear of Booker judges bypassing books set in the future.

Take The Sunset Pilgrims by Jenni Fagan, which is set in the winter of 2020-21 - a date that, despite its imminence, still looks and sounds like one of Captain Kirk's stardates to my generation. With characters coming to terms with cataclysmic climate change and transgender issues, it is a book of our times, and would sit nicely on a Booker shortlist.

I also enjoyed Ros Barber's excellent Devotion, which had echoes of Brave New World, Enduring Love and - inevitably for a book set in the near-future whose protagonist is a paranoid, suicidal, psychiatrist - the works of JG Ballard (who, you will remember, only got shortlisted for the Booker when he wrote about the past in Empire of the Sun.) But I'm still not sure what to make of Aliya Whiteley's small and perfectly odd The Arrival of Missives - A Month In The Country meets the new-weird?

Other futuristic or dystopian novels I am keen to read and would be delighted to see on the longlist include A Field Guide to Reality by Joanna Kavenna, The Countenance Divine by Michael Hughes, Hunters & Collectors by M. Suddain, The Mandibles by Lionel Shriver, When The Floods Came by Clare Morrall and The Unseen World by Liz Moore. I am not holding my breath on their behalves though.

Booker juries are always more receptive to historical fiction, and this year there are a couple of North American century-spanning epics for them to consider: The Fortunes by Peter Ho Davies, and Annie Proulx's Barkskins - her first novel for over a decade - which was my tip for the prize until it received rather mixed reviews. I would expect one or both of them to be on the list.

Other 800+page gorillas that the judges may have tackled include Garth Risk Hallberg's City on Fire; and Louis Armand's 888-page behemoth The Combinations, which has been described as “Kafka’s The Trial meets Robert Musil’s The Man Without Qualities” (possibly by the author himself for all I know); but not Alan Moore's Jerusalem - which is published too late for this year's prize.

In recent years Booker juries have tended to choose winners who are either very well-known (Hilary Mantel, Julian Barnes) or very much unknown (Kiran Desai, Aravind Adiga, Eleanor Catton, Richard Flanagan, Marlon James), so perhaps some Rumsfeldian Analysis is called for...

Known Knowns - well-received works by established writers

The Noise of Time by Julian Barnes and Graham Swift's Mothering Sunday have both received citical acclaim making them strong favourites, and Edna O'Brien's The Little Red Chairs also has a lot of admirers.

I would be surprised if Howard Jacobson isn't on the longlist as per usual with his contribution to the Hogarth Shakespeare series Shylock Is My Name. It is full of his customary satirical wit - including the odd sentence that, if Jane Austen were alive, she would want returned.

Unknown Knowns - forthcoming works by established writers

New books are on the way from Ali Smith (Autumn), Jonathan Safran Foer (Here I Am) and previous winners Ian McEwan (Nutshell) and JM Coetzee (The Schooldays of Jesus).

Known Unknowns - Books by unknown writers with a buzz around them

"A novel without a single full stop, it is easily the most all-consuming and splendid sentence I have ever read" says Sara Baume of Mike McCormack's Solar Bones; while the chapters of Harry Parker's Anatomy of a Soldier are narrated by inanimate objects and can be read in any order, "because that’s what it’s like to be blown up." Both sound like strong contenders.

Winners of other prizes that are eligible for this year's Booker include The Sympathiser by Viet Thanh Nguyen, which won Pulitzer prize earlier this year and Kevin Barry's Beatlebone - winner of the Goldsmith's Prize for 2015. Chinelo Okparanta's first novel Under the Udala Trees, won the 2016 Lambda Literary Award for Lesbian Fiction, and Garth Greenwell's What Belongs To You seems to be this year's nominee for “the Great Gay Novel for our times”. Two other debut novels I would not be surprised to see on the longlist are Homegoing by Yaa Gyasi and Taduno's Song by Odafe Atogun.

And many, many more as the K-Tel advert used to say...

Unknown Unknowns - books we haven't heard of by writers we don't know

“Whereof one cannot speak, thereof one must be silent.”

My sleepy eyes are struggling to read as many books as I would like these days, and I do not believe that I have read this year's Booker winner yet - although I am hoping that will change when I finally get hold of The Cauliflower® by Nicola Barker. And I will stick my neck out and predict that Megan Bradbury's debut novel Everyone Is Watching ought to be on the shortlist. Art, love, and life dance through the pages of this "beautiful, kaleidoscopic imagining of the artists' creation of New York“ (Eimear McBride). My fingers are crossed for both.

The judges for the prize are chaired by the historian Amanda Foreman, alongside actor Olivia Williams, author Abdulrazak Gurnah, writer and academic Jon Day, and the poet David Harsent.

Judges for the 2017 Man Booker International Prize have also been announced. In the chair is Nick Barley, Director of the Edinburgh International Book Festival, and he is joined by translator Daniel Hahn; authors Elif Shafak and Chika Unigwe and the poet Helen Mort. They can all be followed on Twitter... @nickbarleyedin @danielhahn02 @HelenMort @Elif_Safak & @chikaunigwe and, of course, there is a list for potential contenders at Goodreads: https://www.goodreads.com/list/show/95298

Vegetarian Takes The Cake

2016-05-17T14:41:00.000+01:00

The Man Booker International Prize for 2016 has been awarded to South Korean author Han Kang for her novel The Vegetarian. Translator Deborah Smith shares the £50,000 prize.

Originally published as three separate stories, The Vegetarian tells the story of a young woman who chooses to live like a plant as a way of rejecting the violence inherent in human nature, and was the unanimous choice of the six judges.

The brilliant shortlist this year was perhaps a good illustration of why translated literary fiction now outsells literary fiction written in English in the UK.

Meanwhile, the longlist for the ordinary (ornery?) UK Man Booker Prize 2016 will be revealed on July 27th, with the shortlist following on September 13th and the winner announced on October 25th.

There are at least nine former winners with novels out this year: Aravind Adiga, Julian Barnes, JM Coetzee, Howard Jacobson, James Kelman, Thomas Keneally, Yann Martel, Ian McEwan, Graham Swift. Yes, they are all men, but never fear, there are plenty of strong female contenders too - please peruse and vote for your favourites on the (far-from-exhaustive) list of eligible titles on goodreads:

https://www.goodreads.com/list/show/92705.Man_Booker_Prize_Eligible_2016

2016 Man Booker International Prize shortlist

2016-04-14T14:47:00.000+01:00

After reading 155 novels constituting "the finest fiction in translation" the judges of the 2016 Man Booker International Prize have settled on this shortlist:

José Eduardo Agualusa (Angola) – A General Theory of Oblivion (Harvill Secker)

Translator: Daniel Hahn

Elena Ferrante (Italy) – The Story of the Lost Child (Europa Editions)

Translator: Ann Goldstein

Han Kang (South Korea) – The Vegetarian (Portobello Books)

Translator: Deborah Smith

Orhan Pamuk (Turkey) – A Strangeness in My Mind (Faber & Faber)

Translator: Ekin Oklap

Robert Seethaler (Austria) – A Whole Life (Picador)

Translator: Charlotte Collins

Yan Lianke (China) – The Four Books (Chatto & Windus)

Translator: Carlos Rojas

The shortlisted authors and translators receive £1,000 each.

The winner of the £50,000 prize (shared equally by the author and the translator) will be announced at a dinner in London's Victoria & Albert Museum on May 16th. The big question is will 'Elena Ferrante' - the resolutely pseudonymous Italian author - show up?

I would like to take this opportunity to add my condolences to the family and friends of Kevin Peterson a.k.a. KevinfromCanada, one of the best literary bloggers and commentators, who died last month. Canadian literature has lost a great champion.

Man Booker International Prize 2016 Longlist

2016-03-10T13:40:00.000+00:00

The first longlist for the new style Man Booker International Prize has been announced, and in true Booker Prize tradition it includes a tiger:

José Eduardo Agualusa (Angola)
A General Theory of Oblivion (Harvill Secker)
Translator: Daniel Hahn

Elena Ferrante (Italy)
The Story of the Lost Child (Europa Editions)
Translator: Ann Goldstein

Han Kang (South Korea)
The Vegetarian (Portobello Books)
Translator: Deborah Smith

Maylis de Kerangal (France)
Mend the Living (Maclehose Press)
Translator: Jessica Moore

Eka Kurniawan (Indonesia)
Man Tiger (Verso Books)
Translator: Labodalih Sembiring

Yan Lianke (China)
The Four Books (Chatto & Windus)
Translator: Carlos Rojas

Fiston Mwanza Mujila (Congo/Austria)
Tram 83 (Jacaranda)
Translator: Roland Glasser

Raduan Nassar (Brazil)
A Cup of Rage (Penguin Modern Classics)
Translator: Stefan Tobler

Marie NDiaye (France)
Ladivine (Maclehose Press)
Translator: Jordan Stump

Kenzaburō Ōe (Japan)
Death by Water (Atlantic Books)
Translator: Deborah Boliner Boem

Aki Ollikainen (Finland)
White Hunger (Peirene Press)
Translators: Emily Jeremiah & Fleur Jeremiah

Orhan Pamuk (Turkey)
A Strangeness in My Mind (Faber & Faber)
Translator: Ekin Oklap

Robert Seethaler (Austria)
A Whole Life (Picador)
Translator: Charlotte Collins

The prize, which used to be for a body of work, was previously awarded to Ismail Kadare (in 2005), Chinua Achebe (2007), Alice Munro (2009), Philip Roth (2011), Lydia Davis (2013) and László Krasznahorkai (2015). It has now merged with The Independent Foreign Fiction Prize and become an annual award for a single book (a novel or short stories) translated into English and published in the UK.

This year's judges are chaired by Boyd Tonkin of The Independent. His four co-judges are the poet and author Ruth Padel; the novelist Tahmima Anam; Princeton University professor David Bellos; and Daniel Medin from the American University of Paris.

The shortlist of six books will be revealed on April 14th, with each of the shortlisted authors and translators receiving £1,000. The winner of the £50,000 prize - shared equally by the author and the translator - will be announced at a dinner in London's Victoria & Albert Museum on May 16th.

Marlon James wins 2015 Man Brraper Prize

2015-10-14T12:21:00.000+01:00

So, in the end there was no need for any more brute-force voting, the judges went out all guns blazing, and unanimously awarded the £50,000 Man Booker Prize to the “very exciting, very violent, full of swearing” A Brief History of Seven Killings, and Marlon James has become the first Jamaican-born winner. At 686 pages, A Brief History of Seven Killings is also one of the longest winners, continuing the trend towards hulking tomes – much to Salman Rushdie’s chagrin: "Just as I start writing short books, long books are in. My days of long books are over" he told The Telegraph last week.

"Someone said to me they like to give Booker winners to their mother to read, but this might be a little difficult" Michael Wood, chair of this year’s judges, admitted. Yes, but on the other hand it might be the perfect Christmas present for your Gangsta Granny. After hearing Nonesuch Book blogger Frances on The Readers’ Man Booker Podcast, and Sarah Churchwell on the BBC News channel coverage, both champion A Brief History of Seven Killings I was not surprised it won, it sounds like a literary box of fireworks.

So that’s Booker 2015 over. It’s been emotional.

Now let’s take a quick peek at 2016.

The longlist for the new-style Man Booker International Prize will be announced in March, the shortlist in April and the winner in May. There is already a list of possible candidates for that on goodreads, and I have just initiated the Man Booker Prize Eligible 2016 list there as well.

Big names vying to be snubbed in favour of “new voices and younger writers" next year include: Julian Barnes, Don DeLillo, Hilary Mantel, Zadie Smith, and maybe even the long-awaited sequel to A Suitable Boy by Vikram Seth. There may even be a bit of Cauliflower® in the Booker stew.

Now it's time for this blog to go back into hibernation.

Zzzz.

IQvEQ?

2015-10-13T14:23:00.000+01:00

There’s no point me making any predictions here, because by the time anyone reads this post the result will have been announced. (I’m afraid I lack the wherewithal to keep up with technology and was unable to get online yesterday as the distant library computers I rely on were all down.) Anyway what do I know? As usual I only got round to reading half the shortlist - partly because I spent a lot of time wallowing in Iain Pears’ Arcadia instead. (Very enjoyable, like Narnia for grown-ups, and much better than The Bone Clocks.) I couldn't fault The Fishermen - it deserves to be as widely read and successful as The Kite Runner, but The Year of the Runaways eluded me until last week, so I cannot offer an opinion as to whether the mystery punter known as ‘Mr Smith‘ will be in the money again this year. I suspect that those two are the sort of books that end up on the shortlist because everyone agrees they are excellent, but without them being the out-and-out favourite of any particular judge. Possible compromise choices if the other four all prove too divisive.

I couldn’t face A Brief History of Seven Killings, partly because of the small print (yes, I have reached that age) but mostly because it has been compared to James Ellroy and Quentin Tarantino. I remember one Christmas my local library (now an empty building) wrapped up some books and handed them out to customers as an extra, mystery loan. Trouble was, half of them were wrapped in blue paper and half in pink. It wasn’t hard to imagine the type of books each colour concealed. I realised then that any book that can be wrapped in blue or pink is of little interest to me. I can’t help wondering if this year the judging process has been a little fractious because, more than any previous year, the shortlist suggests a gender divide.

I suspect that Satin Island, for example, must have had the determined backing of one male-brained judge for it to get this far. It is interesting, but more semi-intellectual noodling than novel in my opinion - a slight, superficial addition to Tom McCarthy's oeuvre. Although it does sit nicely on the shortlist for The Goldsmith's Prize - the increasingly impressive rival to the Booker - which prizes originality: novelness, you might say. Their list also includes The Field of the Cloth of Gold - the latest inscrutable treasure from Magnus Mills, Acts of the Assassins by Richard Beard, Grief Is The Thing With Feathers by Max Porter, Lurid & Cute by Adam Thirlwell, and Kevin Barry's forthcoming Beatlebone.

Anyone wanting experimental fiction, and thinking Satin Island is it, ought to venture back to the very first year of the Booker Prize (1969) and seek out Nicholas Mosley's Impossible Object which should have won then, and would have walked onto the shortlist any year since. Two of the judges - including the renowned literary critic Frank Kermode - favoured it, but were "silenced."

"I wanted to write you something impossible," we are told at the end, "like a staircase climbing a spiral to come out where it started or a cube with a vertical line at the back overlapping a horizontal one in front. These cannot exist in three dimensions but can be drawn in two; by cutting out one dimension a fourth is created. The object is that life is impossible; one cuts out fabrication and creates reality."

Is reality the impossible object of fiction? He asks. That’s way above my literary pay grade. (Which is zero.) I would like to refer you to a review by John_Self, but there doesn’t seem to be one. We should all pester him to write one.

I was also surprised that A Spool of Blue Thread made it to the shortlist. Indeed, on the day the longlist was announced I was planning to take it back to the library, unfinished, because I didn’t expect it to be on the list. It seemed to be a well-written, good-hearted family saga any well-meaning librarian could happily wrap in pink, rather than literary fiction. I wondered whether I might just as well visit Peyton Place. I think I had been expecting something more like Carol Shields who, sadly, never won the Booker Prize. She should have won in 2002 with Unless, but the judges that year chose a lesser Canadian writer: Yann Martel. Life of Pi, went on to become the biggest selling Booker Prize winner ever, and recently received a Presidential seal of approval from Barack Obama who read it with his daughter, describing it as “a lovely book – an elegant proof of God, and the power of storytelling." Nevertheless, the judges got it wrong. Unless, the last novel Shields wrote before succumbing to cancer, is a book every woman needs to read, and every man should be made to read. It also opens with the wisest first paragraph I have ever read:

"It happens that I am going through a period of great unhappiness and loss just now. All my life I've heard people speak of finding themselves in acute pain, bankrupt in spirit and body, but I've never understood what they meant. To lose. To have lost. I believed these visitations of darkness lasted only a few minutes or hours and that these saddened people, in between bouts, were occupied, as we all were, with the useful monotony of happiness. But happiness is not what I thought. Happiness is the lucky pane of glass you carry in your head. It takes all your cunning just to hang on to it, and once it's smashed you have to move into a different sort of life."

Talking of life...

Not since Owen Meany has a character in American fiction had such an emotional impact on readers as Jude St. Francis in A Little Life - perhaps the strongest favourite for the Booker Prize since Wolf Hall. It has split people like nothing since the death of Princess Diana. Perhaps for similar psychological reasons.

Many readers have been deeply affected by it, but some who felt obliged to read it because it was on the Booker shortlist seem to have read it through gritted teeth. (Colette_Jones on The Mookse and the Gripes forum suggested that A Little Life was likely to win because “if it didn't annoy them the first and second times, they're not going to notice problems on a third reading.” Ouch.)

Last year I said that longlists suck, and I am even more convinced this year. If the list of books entered for the prize were published instead of the longlist, no-one in their right mind would try and read all 150-plus novels. We would just read the ones that most appealed to us, rather than trying to plough through a dozen books chosen by a literary committee. No wonder some followers of the prize seem permanently disgruntled by the judges' selections. In the end the judges are tasked with finding the best book of the year, everything else is gravy. So scrap the longlist and give us the list of submissions instead I say. (Don’t worry, I won’t hold my breath.)

I would be happy to see A Little Life win, but it isn't the best candidate for the title of Great American Novel I've read this year, or even for the title greatest American Gay Novel (as it has been labelled) because back in January I read James Baldwin's Just Above My Head (1979) – a book most people have never heard of (I certainly hadn’t) which is shameful. One of the all-time great novelists at the peak of his powers, as they say. Around the same time I heard Stephen Fry on the radio show Just A Minute attempting to list some Great American Novels. Disappointingly, he never got beyond dead white men. Which should remind us to give some kudos to the Booker Prize for promoting so much diverse, quality fiction for so many years.

Grim Shortlist for 2015 Man Booker Prize

2015-09-15T13:54:00.001+01:00

The shortlist for the 2015 Man Booker Prize for Fiction is here:

Marlon James - A Brief History of Seven Killings (Oneworld Publications)
Tom McCarthy - Satin Island (Jonathan Cape)
Chigozie Obioma - The Fishermen (ONE, Pushkin Press)
Sunjeev Sahota - The Year of the Runaways (Picador)
Anne Tyler - A Spool of Blue Thread (Chatto & Windus)
Hanya Yanagihara - A Little Life (Picador)

Aged 28, Chigozie Obioma is the youngest person on the list, while Anne Tyler, at 73, is the oldest, and Marlon James is the first Jamaican to be shortlisted for the prize. Congratulations to him for that, but I doubt that I will be reading his book (or watching the HBO TV series) as it sounds too violent for me. Not that the others are all hearts and flowers either: "There is a tremendous amount of violence," as Michael Wood, who is chairing the judging panel this year, admitted. "Yes, they contain grim things," another judge (Sam Leith) said, "but there isn't a single book that isn't touched with humour." Hmm.

Many people are surprised at the omission of Lila. Well, Marilynne Robinson is a beautiful writer but, as someone who has little or no patience with religion, I couldn't get very far with that one either. I ended up playing a game with it. I repeatedly opened it at random to see if I could find a page with no religious words (God, The Bible, missionaries, prayer, church, preaching etc.) You can probably imagine how rare such pages are.

BBC 2's Artsnight will devote a whole programme to this year's Man Booker Prize on Friday 9th, and the winner of the £50,000 prize will be announced at The Guildhall, London, on Tuesday 13th October. Let's hope there's not too much blood on the carpet.

The 2015 Man Booker Prize Longlist

2015-07-29T17:02:00.000+01:00

The longlist for the 2015 Man Booker Prize was revealed at noon today.

The thirteen books in contention for the £50,000 prize are:

Bill Clegg - Did You Ever Have a Family (Jonathan Cape)

Anne Enright - The Green Road (Jonathan Cape)

Marlon James - A Brief History of Seven Killings (Oneworld Publications)

Laila Lalami - The Moor's Account (Periscope, Garnet Publishing)

Tom McCarthy - Satin Island (Jonathan Cape)

Chigozie Obioma - The Fishermen (ONE, Pushkin Press)

Andrew O’Hagan - The Illuminations (Faber & Faber)

Marilynne Robinson - Lila (Virago)

Anuradha Roy - Sleeping on Jupiter (MacLehose Press, Quercus)

Sunjeev Sahota - The Year of the Runaways (Picador)

Anna Smaill - The Chimes (Sceptre)

Anne Tyler - A Spool of Blue Thread (Chatto & Windus)

Hanya Yanagihara - A Little Life (Picador)

Back in the eighties, when I first had a home computer, I decided it would be worth trying to win the pools by using it to predict the football results. Oh, the optimism of youth. I wrote a program to calculate the most likely score draws from a variety of data: previous results, current form, newspaper tipsters etc. Then ran it for several weeks, tweaking the weightings given to the various factors until it became quite good at predicting…the predictable draws – which was usually about half of them. Obviously it was completely hopeless at predicting the unexpected. Who can foresee rain falling from a clear blue sky? Indeed, the UK Met Office seems incapable of predicting rain full stop.

Why am I telling you this? Is it because I hope that one of the judges will be reading and might suggest to the Chancellor of the Exchequer that he could save taxpayers some money by privatising our hopeless Met Office? (Want to know what the weather is like? Look out the window! As Jeremy Paxman once told Newsnight viewers.) No. It’s just to point out the surprisingly similar degree of unpredictability between twenty-two grown adults kicking a ball around and half-a-dozen others judging literary fiction. Bill Who? Marlon James?!

Marlon James is the first Jamaican-born author to be longlisted for the prize, and Laila Lalami the first from Morocco - although both now reside in the USA; while Bill Clegg is “an American literary agent known for his ruthless negotiating” according to The Guardian. I’m not sure whether they are trying to imply anything by that.

There will be a number of reactions to this longlist. Someone somewhere will mishear and think: Nick Clegg up for the Booker Prize? I didn’t know manifestoes were eligible? Many will be pleased to see that women are in the majority, some will decry the fact that Americans outnumber Brits in only the second year they have been eligible. Others will be off to the bookies to put a bet on Hanya Yanagihara. A Little Life? Big favourite.

The list of those “snubbed” this year includes: Harper Lee (told you so), Salman Rushdie (twenty years since he was last shortlisted), Kate Atkinson (who has still, amazingly, never once pinged the Booker radar), Margaret Atwood, Jonathan Franzen and Kazuo Ishiguro - so you can cross them off your posh bingo cards. I decided in advance that if Quicksand by Steve Toltz was not on their list, then either the judges are on the wrong wavelength, or I am. Admittedly I have only read the first chapter so far – but, sheesh, it’s already streets ahead of a couple on the list that I have read. To be fair, the judges have read 156 books and the longlist “could have been twice as long” according to Michael Wood, this year’s chair of the judging panel.

The shortlist will be announced on September 15^th, and the winner on October 13^th.

P.S.

Here’s something for those of you who like trivia: nine of the last eleven Man Booker winners had titles beginning with the definite article, and the other two were both by Hilary Mantel.

Catch-up-2015

2015-07-23T12:50:00.000+01:00

Since I last updated this blog, two pillars of the Booker Prize have passed away. Martyn Goff, administrator of the prize from 1972-2006, died in March, aged 91. Then a couple of weeks later, his successor, Ion Trewin, succumbed to cancer, aged 71. Trewin had been the youngest chair of a Booker jury in 1974, and was the editor of Thomas Keneally's Schindler's Ark which won the prize in 1982.

The last of Ion Trewin's many contributions to the literary world was to write an obituary of his predecessor, from which I learned that Goff had written nine novels in the 1950's and 60's, several with explicitly gay themes. This at a time when (male) homosexuality was still a crime. The Plaster Fabric (1957) and TheYoungest Director (1961) in particular were credited with helping to gain public support for a reform of the law. (So there are another couple of additions to my growing list of pioneering gay novels which ought to be reissued - preferably as part of a set of LGBT Classics. Along with works by authors such as Ronald Firbank, Stephen Spender, Francis King, Paul Bailey, etc. Are you listening Penguin? Vintage? Bright pink covers optional.)

Goff expertly kept the Booker prize in the headlines with strategic leaks (or “tactical indiscretions” as Nicholas Clee puts it.) A similar attribute was required of his successor. When Trewin was being interviewed for the position of literary director, Julia Neuberger, one of the trustees of the Booker Prize Foundation, asked him whether he was devious. He said yes, and got the job.

Everyone who follows the Booker Prize owes the pair of them much respect and many thanks for the work they did in overseeing and promoting the prize for so long. My commiserations to their families and friends. Good luck to Gaby Wood, head of books at TheDaily Telegraph, and a Man Booker judge in 2011, who will take over as Literary Director from October.

RIP Martyn Goff (1923–2015) and Ion Trewin (1943–2015)

In May, the 2015 Man Booker International Prize was awarded to the Hungarian author László Krasznahorkai - whose first, and most acclaimed, novel Satantango, originally published in Hungary in 1985, was belatedly translated into English in 2012. The judges lauded his “extraordinary sentences, [...] sentences of incredible length that go to incredible lengths, [...] epic sentences that, like a lint roll, pick up all sorts of odd and unexpected things..." Which reminds me of the longest sentence I ever read. It occurred early in Tim Parks' Europa, shortlisted in 1997. If I remember correctly it went on for several pages and innumerable subclauses. It was also the last sentence by Tim Parks I ever read.

Krasznahorkai will be the last author to win the Man Booker International Prize for a body of work, as the prize has now merged with The Independent Foreign Fiction Prize and becomes an annual award for a single book, with a £50,000 prize split evenly between the author and the translator. The 2016 longlist will be announced in March, the shortlist in April and the winner in May. Boyd Tonkin of The Independent will chair the judges. For speculation as to what may be in the running, there is, already, a list on goodreads.

But what of the main event, the 2015 Man Booker Prize? What might we see on this year's longlist next Wednesday?

Well it is very easy to imagine Kazuo Ishiguro's The Buried Giant and The Wolf Border by Sarah Hall on a Booker Prize list, long or short. Very, very easy.

And be warned: there could be monsters. 600, 700, 800 page monsters. Death and Mr Pickwick by Stephen Jarvis (816pp), for example. "As a former Man Booker judge," Lucasta Miller said in her review, "I will eat my hat if it doesn’t make this year’s list." And we all know how well pledging to eat a hat turns out. Though it might be easier to eat a hat than to try and digest some of the great (i.e. fat) American novels that may have dropped into the judges laps. The Familiar, Volume 1: One Rainy Day in May by Mark Z. Danielewski (880pp) and The Dying Grass by William Vollmann (1376pp) might be big outsiders, but A Little Life by Hanya Yanagihara (720 pp) and City on Fire by Garth Risk Hallberg (944 pp) have both received massive praise and, if submitted, could be hard to ignore. As will Flood of Fire by Amitav Ghosh and Arcadia by Iain Pears, which both top 600 pages. Thank goodness A Suitable Girl still isn't due until next year. (It's always next year).

Talking of girls, erm, I mean women, Nicola Griffith recently complained that most prize-winning fiction is written by men, about men. Well this year's judges ought to be able to find a few novels that pass the old Bechdel Test as there are a lot of strong female contenders around - including previous winners Margaret Atwood, Pat Barker and Anne Enright, as well as newly eligible Americans Toni Morrison, Anne Tyler and - oh, have you heard? - Harper Lee has a new book out. Bookmakers William Hill are offering odds of 33-1 against Go Set A Watchman winning - but, as with The Goldfinch last year, I think it unlikely to have been entered. Why use one of your limited number of submissions on a book everyone is going to read anyway? Expect some 'Harper Lee Snubbed' headlines after the longlist announcement.

Of course, trying to guess which books will have been submitted is surrenderously daunting - especially as the number of books publishers can enter is so complicated under the new rules. (I suspect the formula Z(u,w)=Z0(w)[1-exp{-b(w)u}] may be involved somewhere.) All the more reason why the list of titles entered for the prize should not be kept secret. Otherwise how can we - and by 'we' I mean Nicola Griffith, because I'm a bloke so I can't be bothered - how can we know whether it is the fault of the judges, or whether publishers are just not submitting many books by, or about, women?

Anyway I'm sure you must be dying to know what would I like to see on the longlist next week - if only to point out that most of them are books by men, about men.

There is The Field of the Cloth of Gold by Magnus Mills for starters. He is a unique literary talent who should be more widely-read and prized. And I agree with Jackie at FarmLaneBooks about I Am Radar by Reif Larsen, although I haven't read it yet. (It seems that the library copy I ordered is not being bought after all - something a longlisting would change, and a 40% budget cut would completely knacker.) I'm also looking forward to tackling Quicksand - Steve Toltz's first novel since being shortlisted for A Fraction of the Whole in 2008.

I have just read The Illuminations by Andrew O'Hagan, and it would be not be out of place on the longlist, and I only recently finished Jonathan Buckley's last novel Nostalgia, in all its vivid historical detail, after reading it on-and-off for you-would-not-believe how long. Just you try and stop me from diving into The River is the River.

Also high on my already-far-too-big-for-one-lifetime-to-be-read-list are: Acts of the Assassins by Richard Beard, Glass by Alex Christofi, Don't Let Him Know by Sandip Roy and The Year of the Runaways by Sunjeev Sahota.

Some books almost deserve longlisting for their titles alone: Patrick de Witt's new novel “Undermajordomo Minor“, for example (his first since being shortlisted for The Sisters Brothers in 2011). Then there's "GrandmotherDivided by Monkey Equals Outer Space" by Nora Chassler; and Nell Leyshon's "Memoirs of a Dipper: in which ... you get to learn shitloads about me and I learn fuck all about you - it's a memoir, it ain't a youmoir".

Finally, The Guardian's Not-the-Booker Prize is on the prowl again. Think of it as the January Sale of the literary scene. All scrabbling elbows and cuffs. Predicting what will win that scrummage is literally a mug's game. But if that mug doesn't go to The Making of ZombieWars by Aleksandar Hemon I will eat my dinner.

PJE's Booker Blog

The 2019 Booker Prize Shortlist

Booker Prize Longlist 2019

Milkman delivers

¹ Approximately. More like $65,000 unless the pound drops even further.² Apologies for the delay. Sometimes I think the world is spinning a bit too fast for me to cling on.

2018 Man Booker Prize Shortlist

2018 Man Booker Prize Longlist

The Golden Man Booker Prize

George Saunders wins the 2017 Man Booker Prize

2017 Man Booker Prize Shortlist

2017 Man Booker Prize Longlist - the strongest ever?

Waiting For The Cut

RIP John Berger

Man Booker's American Sellout

The 2016 Man Booker Prize for Fiction - Shortlist

Some thoughts on the 2016 Manhood Booker Prize longlist

Do Not Say You Were Not Told

2016 Man Booker Prize Longlist

Many are read, few are chosen.

Vegetarian Takes The Cake

2016 Man Booker International Prize shortlist

Man Booker International Prize 2016 Longlist

Marlon James wins 2015 Man Brraper Prize

IQvEQ?

Grim Shortlist for 2015 Man Booker Prize

The 2015 Man Booker Prize Longlist

Catch-up-2015

¹ Approximately. More like $65,000 unless the pound drops even further.
² Apologies for the delay. Sometimes I think the world is spinning a bit too fast for me to cling on.