Books, arts and culture

Man Booker prize

If only we bet real money

Jul 27th 2010, 16:16 by F.R. | LONDON

THE judges for the 2010 Man Booker prize for fiction have just announced the longlist: 13 books (the "Man Booker Dozen"), culled from 138:

Peter Carey, "Parrot and Olivier 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)
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)

Good to see so many of our predictions turned out to be right. The list includes David Mitchell, who so nearly won for "Cloud Atlas" in 2004, the year our literary editor was a judge, but now for a book with a very divided following: "The Thousand Autumns of Zacob de Zoet" (reviewed by The Economist here). Excellent to see two other books we failed to mention, but should have: Paul Murray's "Skippy Dies", a wonderful comic novel about school, and "The Slap" by Christos Tsiolkas, a power play about sex, money and how not to raise kids, all placed in the unusual setting of late 20th-century Greek Melbourne. Reducing this to a shortlist is going to be tough indeed.

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omnivorous Jul 28th 2010 9:15 GMT

The Omnivore (www.theomnivore.co.uk) has rounded up all the press reviews for the longlisted books, bringing you a useful digest of quotes from UK and US newspapers and literary journals:

http://blog.theomnivore.co.uk/2010/07/27/man-booker-prize-2010-longlist-...

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