AS Byatt - The Children's BookSo ... 13 titles - a Booker's dozen. A safely literary list. A list of authors who feel to me like old friends and I am already happily anticipating the hours spent in their company.
JM Coetzee - Summertime
Adam Foulds - The Quickening Maze
Sarah Hall - How to Paint a Dead Man
Samantha Harvey - The Wilderness
James Lever - Me Cheeta
Hilary Mantel - Wolf Hall
Simon Mawer - The Glass Room
Ed O'Loughlin - Not Untrue & Not Unkind
James Scudamore - Heliopolis
Colm Toibin - Brooklyn
William Trevor - Love and Summer
Sarah Waters - The Little Stranger
Coetzee has of course won the Booker twice before, and A.S. Byatt, once. William Trevor has been previously shortlisted four times, Sarah Waters and Colm Toibin twice each, and Hilary Mantel once.
I read Simon Mawar's Mendel's Dwarf, and felt then that he should have received more recognition for his work.
I'm glad that the prize has also highlighted some deserving new (at least to me) names.
But there isn't much of an international showing on the list this year, is there? Where are the Indian authors? And of course, for us in Malaysia, where's our Tash?
Postscript
Booker back in the mainstream says Boyd Tonkin :
After years of praise or blame (according to outlook) about the readiness of the Man Booker Prize panels to flatter and promote the boom in fiction from or about India or Pakistan, this year's judges seem to have declared war on the Subcontinent. ... Yet the relative absence of surprising names, and of independent publishing houses, tells its own story. Since the millennium, with off-the-wall or debutant victors such as DBC Pierre, Yann Martel, Anne Enright and (last year) Adiga, the Man Booker has drifted down the scenic byways of the promising, the untried, the quirky, the left-field. This long-list shoves it back into the mainstream with a vengeance.
There's also a summary of each of the books here.
2 comments:
The list feels soooo empty without the usual long-term squatter: the female Indian writer writing about post-colonial, transmigrational, viablebuyable tale with the expected/mandatory "twist" of incestrapechildabusedaddytouchedmethere plot element leading to self-imposed flouncey-exiley to AmeriLondonica.
:-)))
hmm, a Booker's dozen, a Baker's dozen, can i say a Teacher's dozen too Sharon?
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