Booker longlist announced

Novels by Tom McCarthy, Rose Tremain and David Mitchell are nominated for the literary prize, but Am

This year’s Booker Prize longlist has been announced. The novels that made the list, plus links to NS reviews and coverage, are:

Peter Carey Parrot and Oliver in America (Faber and Faber)

Emma Donoghue Room (Pan MacMillan — Picador)

Helen Dunmore The Betrayal (Penguin — Fig Tree)

Damon Galgut In a Strange Room (Grove Atlantic — Atlantic Books)

Howard Jacobson The Finkler Question (Bloomsbury) — this will be reviewed by Leo Robson in Thursday’s magazine

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Andrea Levy The Long Song (Headline Publishing Group — Headline Review)

Tom McCarthy C (Random House – Jonathan Cape)

David Mitchell The Thousand Autumns of Zacob de Zoet (Hodder & Stoughton — Sceptre)

Lisa Moore February (Random House — Chatto & Windus)

Paul Murray Skippy Dies (Penguin — Hamish Hamilton)

Rose Tremain Trespass (Random House — Chatto & Windus)

Christos Tsiolkas The Slap (Grove Atlantic — Tuskar Rock)

Alan Warner The Stars in the Bright Sky (Random House — Jonathan Cape)

Andrew Motion, chair of the judging panel, said:

Here are 13 exceptional novels — books we have chosen for their intrinsic quality, without reference to the past work of their authors. Wide-ranging in their geography and their concern, they tell powerful stories which make the familiar strange and cover an enormous range of history and feeling. We feel confident that they will provoke and entertain.

The first sentence of Motion’s statement is particularly striking, given that the judges chose not to longlist the recent efforts from two of Britain’s best-known novelists — Ian McEwan and Martin Amis.