Dear Everyone We’ve read Antonia Honeywell’s list of the 10 things she learned from reading the Man Booker longlist (read it here), and have made particular note of point 5, namely the superiority of America and Americans in All Things. We are shocked – SHOCKED – to find that for
So the Man Booker shortlist has been announced. Jim Crace (no surprise there), Colm Toibin (for the third time), Eleanor Catton (why not? Thought they might), NoViolet Bulawayo, Ruth Ozeki and Jhumpa Lahiri (*checks again, slightly taken aback*). While I am extremely pleased that the list includes four women, I
Unfortunately I can only select writers from the official Man Booker long list for my imagined shortlist. So I can’t feature Maggie Gee or Evie Wyld or Patrick Ness. So, a drumroll please… the shortlist will consist of…Crace (because he’s going to win), Toibin (to prove that short novels can
I spent this summer reading the Booker longlist. All thirteen novels. Every word, cover to cover. The shortlist will be announced tomorrow. Mine will be announced before midnight tonight. In the meantime, here are ten things I have learned from my reading. A book doesn’t have to be published to
Lahiri’s novel is officially published later this month. It’s a curious quirk of the awards that a novel can be longlisted – indeed shortlisted – before any general reader has had the chance to read it. But than again, the Man Booker is not a reader’s prize – it’s an
Having spent some time wondering why historical settings have been so popular in this year’s long list, we come to a novel which is categorically, unequivocally contemporary. Not only in its subject matter – an American building project in Iraq from which $53 million is embezzled by a man using
To the long list of distinguished novels set in the Second World War – The English Patient, The Reader, Birdsong, to name but a very few – must be added Alison Macleod’s Unexploded. Macleod’s third novel is the story of a marriage, the story of a war and the story
In his round-up of this year’s Man Booker longlisted titles, Philip Hensher called Almost English the novel that everyone would love. It’s a social comedy involving a homesick teenager, an obnoxious historian and a timid, beholden mother who lacks the gumption to be anything other than grateful to her vanished
Five Star Billionaire is a novel rich in vivid characters, with a setting unfamiliar enough to be interesting, described in just enough detail to be familiar. Not everyone has a happy ending; not everyone gets what they deserve, but this is Shanghai, China, and everyone is grasping for what they
We are in Africa, more specifically in Zimbabwe, Bulawayo’s homeland. The voice is that of ten-year old Darling, running from her shanty town to steal guavas from the gardens of the rich; the plot covers (among other things) civil war, rebellion, corrupt governments, immigration, female genital mutilation and the casting