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Oh lordy, is it award season yet? In other words, is summer over already? Here in Seattle the mercury just rose about 70 degrees last week, so you can understand if I'm a little grumbly, but I do like the prizes, and today's ceremonial first salvo got my blood going. It's the Man Booker longlist, a baker's dozen that will be narrowed down to the shortlist of six for the big UK/Commonwealth prize on September 7:
- Parrot and Olivier in America by Peter Carey
- Room by Emma Donoghue
- The Betrayal by Helen Dunmore (Amazon.co.uk only so far)
- In a Strange Room by Damon Galgut (UK, or Kindle)
- The Finkler Question by Howard Jacobson (UK)
- The Long Song by Andrea Levy
- C by Tom McCarthy
- The Thousand Autumns of Jacob de Zoet by David Mitchell
- February by Lisa Moore
- Skippy Dies by Paul Murray
- Trespass by Rose Tremain
- The Slap by Christos Tsiolkas
- The Stars in the Bright Sky by Alan Warner (UK)
Peter Carey is a two-time Booker winner, but the 800-pound gorilla is The Thousand Autumns, a big book by a big author who was a popular runner-up for Cloud Atlas and number9dream (and yes, it's one of my current Best of July picks). Room, C, Skippy Dies, and Trespass are all highly anticipated fall releases here in the US, while Dunmore, Galgut, Jacobson, and Warner are all still waiting for US editions to go on the schedule (I expect some will get them now). I was especially happy to see Lisa Moore on the list--I've been a fan ever since we picked her story collection, Open, as our Book of the Year on Amazon.ca way back when. She's the only Canadian on the list, and one of only a few from outside the UK (Galgut is South African and Carey and Tsiolkas Australian).
Over at William Hill they've put The Long Song as the early favorite, at 4-1, with Mitchell close behind at 9-2 and Dunmore at 5-1 (the customer reviews in the UK for the latter, a story of the Soviet Union in the late Stalin era, are terrific, by the way).
Who didn't make this first cut? The big names Amis and McEwan are absent, which is not a complete surprise. Sarah Crown at the Guardianpoints out there are no debut novelists this time around, although there's a fair amount of fresh-ish blood nevertheless. What am I looking forward to checking out? I really liked Tom McCarthy's Remainder (saying I "loved" it seems wrong for such a chilly book), and I've just started C, which seems like a very different animal. But Skippy Dies looks like a tasty romp, and not just because of the adorable 3-book paperback set that Faber is offering alongside the standard hardcover. It's like a cute little sidekick to the more monumental 2666 set from a couple of years ago. --Tom
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