Man Booker Prize longlist announced

For the most part, the judges have ignored the big names.

Man Booker Prize judges take a vow of secrecy upon initiation, so when I bumped in to one of this year’s judges a couple of weeks ago, all he could tell me was that he and his colleagues had settled on what he was confident I’d think was a “very interesting” longlist. That longlist – the “Man Booker Dozen” – has just been announced, and very interesting it is too.

Here are the 12 books chosen by Sir Peter Stothard (chair), Dinah Birch, Amanda Foreman, Dan Stevens and Bharat Tandon.

Nicola Barker, The Yips (Fourth Estate)
Ned Beauman, The Teleportation Accident (Sceptre)
André Brink, Philida (Harvill Secker)
Tan Twan Eng, The Garden of Evening Mists (Myrmidon Books)
Michael Frayn, Skios (Faber & Faber)
Rachel Joyce, The Unlikely Pilgrimage of Harold Fry (Doubleday)
Deborah Levy, Swimming Home (And Other Stories)
Hilary Mantel, Bring up the Bodies (Fourth Estate)
Alison Moore, The Lighthouse (Salt)
Will Self, Umbrella (Bloomsbury)
Jeet Thayil, Narcopolis (Faber & Faber)
Sam Thompson, Communion Town (Fourth Estate)

Announcing the longlist, Peter Stothard said: “Goodness, madness and bewildering urban change are among the themes of this year’s longlist. In an extraordinary year for fiction the ‘Man Booker Dozen’ proves the grip that the novel has on our world. We did not set out to reject the old guard but, after a year of sustained critical argument by a demanding panel of judges, the new has come powering through.”

In trumpeting the judges’ championing of the “new”, Stothard was evidently anticipating some adverse comment about the absence from the list of those members of the “old guard” (and other big names) who have published, or are about to publish, novels this year. Among the notable absentees are Martin Amis, John Lanchester, Zadie Smith and Ian McEwan – though none of their novels, perhaps with the exception of Smith’s forthcoming NW, are among the best these writers have published. In any case, it’d be a pity if everyone was talking about the books that didn’t make it, rather than those that did. Click on the links above to read the NS‘s reviews where available. Forthcoming issues of the magazine will contain reviews of the novels by Nicola Barker and Will Self.