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Man Booker shortlist announced

Shortlist Announcement

Man Booker Prize for Fiction shortlist announced

NICOLA BARKER, ANNE ENRIGHT, MOHSIN HAMID, LLOYD JONES, IAN MCEWAN and INDRA SINHA are the six authors shortlisted for the Man Booker Prize for Fiction 2007, the UK’s annual celebration of the finest in fiction. The shortlist was announced by the chair of judges, Howard Davies, at a press conference at Man Group plc offices in London today (Thursday 6th September).

The six shortlisted books were chosen from a longlist of 13 and are:

* Darkmans by Nicola Barker (4th Estate)
* The Gathering by Anne Enright (Jonathan Cape)
* The Reluctant Fundamentalist by Mohsin Hamid (Hamish Hamilton)
* Mister Pip by Lloyd Jones (John Murray)
* On Chesil Beach by Ian McEwan (Jonathan Cape)
* Animal’s People by Indra Sinha (Simon & Schuster)

Howard Davies, Chair of Judges, comments:

“Selecting a shortlist this year from what was widely seen as an exciting longlist was a tough challenge. We hope the choices we have made after passionate and careful consideration, will attract wide interest.”

The panel commented on each of the titles as follows:

Darkmans – an ambitious and energetic contemporary ghost story with a vibrant cast of characters, set in modern day Ashford.

The Gathering – a very accomplished and dramatic novel of family relationships and personal breakdown in Ireland and England.

The Reluctant Fundamentalist – this is a subtle and thoughtful examination of the raw meat of Anglo-Saxon capitalism, and one man’s personal response to working within it.

Mister Pip – Mr Pip is well-rooted in dramatic and frightening events in Papua New Guinea, with vivid characters and a fascinating literary frame of reference.

On Chesil Beach – a tight and beautifully written narrative which sustains high emotional tension throughout.

Animal’s People – Indra Sinha is an engaged campaigning novelist. The book clearly draws from real life events in Bhopal, but is a sustained imaginative creation in its own right, with intriguing parallel use of new media.

The winner receives £50,000 and can look forward to greatly increased sales and recognition worldwide. Each of the six shortlisted authors, including the winner, receives £2,500 and a designer bound edition of their own book.

The judging panel for the 2007 Man Booker Prize for Fiction is: Howard Davies, Director of the London School of Economics and Political Science; Wendy Cope, poet; Giles Foden, journalist and author; Ruth Scurr, biographer and critic and Imogen Stubbs, actor and writer.

The winner will be announced on Tuesday 16th October at an awards ceremony at the Guildhall, London.
Darkmans by Nicola Barker

Fourth Estate, £17.99

Darkmans is a very modern book about two very old-fashioned subjects: love and jealousy. It’s also a book about invasion, obsession, displacement and possession, about comedy, art, prescription drugs and chiropody. And the main character? The past, which creeps up on the present and whispers something quite dark – quite unspeakable – into its ear.

Nicola Barker was born on 30th March 1966 near Cambridge and lives and works in East London. She was the winner of the David Higham Prize for Fiction and joint winner of the Macmillan Silver Pen Award for Love Your Enemies, her first collection of stories. Her second story collection, Heading Inland, received the John Llewellyn Rhys/Mail on Sunday Prize. Her novel Wide Open won the IMPAC Prize in 2000, and Clear was longlisted for the Man Booker Prize in 2004. She is one of Granta’s ‘Best Young British Novelists’ of the decade.

For further information on Nicola Barker or interview requests please contact Jessica Axe at 4thEstate on 020 8307 4928 or e-mail Jessicaaxe@4thestate.co.uk
The Gathering by Anne Enright

Jonathan Cape, £12.99

The Gathering is a family epic. It is also a sexual history: tracing the line of hurt and redemption through three generations – starting with the grandmother, Ada Merriman – showing how memories warp and family secrets fester. This is a novel about love and disappointment, about thwarted lust and limitless desire, and how our fate is written in the body, not in the stars.

Anne Enright was born on 11th October 1962 in Dublin, where she now lives and works. After studying creative writing under Malcolm Bradbury and Angela Carter at the University of East Anglia, she worked for six years as a TV producer and director in Ireland. She has published one collection of stories, The Portable Virgin, which won the Rooney Prize, and three previous novels, The Wig My Father Wore, What Are You Like? and The Pleasure of Eliza Lynch. What Are You Like? was shortlisted for the Whitbread Novel Award and won the Encore Award. Her first work of non-fiction, Making Babies: Stumbling into Motherhood, was published in 2004.

For further information on Anne Enright or interview requests please contact Christian Lewis at Jonathan Cape 0207 840 8539 or clewis@randomhouse.co.uk
The Reluctant Fundamentalist by Mohsin Hamid

Hamish Hamilton, £14.99

The Reluctant Fundamentalist traces the life and love of Changez, an idealistic young Muslim man who leaves Pakistan to pursue his education in the US. On graduation from Princeton, Changez is recruited to a top job on Wall Street, falls in love with an American woman, Erica, and hopes to achieve a position of status in elite Manhattan society. But post-9/11 he finds himself regarded with suspicion by his fellow New Yorkers and his budding relationship with Erica is overshadowed by her personal demons, as well as his own growing paranoia and resentment at the country he has made home.

Mohsin Hamid was born on 23rd July 1971 in Pakistan, where he grew up. He studied at Princeton and Harvard Law School, worked as a management consultant in New York and now lives in London. His first novel, Moth Smoke was a New York Times Notable Book, won the Betty Trask First Book Award and was a finalist for the PEN/Hemingway Award for best first novel in America. Mohsin has written for TIME, New York Times, The Guardian, The Independent and New Statesman.

For further information on Mohsin Hamid or interview requests please contact Amelia Fairney at Hamish Hamilton on Amelia.Fairney@uk.penguingroup.com or 020 7010 3000
Mister Pip by Lloyd Jones

John Murray, £12.99

Bougainville. 1991. A small village on a lush tropical island in the South Pacific. When the villagers’ safe, predictable lives come to a halt, Bougainville’s children are surprised to find the island’s only white man, a recluse, re-opening the school. Pop Eye, aka Mr Watts, explains he will introduce the children to ‘Mr Dickens’. Matilda and the others think a foreigner is coming to the island and prepare a list of much needed items. They are shocked to discover their acquaintance with Mr Dickens will be through Mr Watts’ reading of Great Expectations. But on an island at war, the power of fiction has dangerous consequences.

Lloyd Jones was born in Wellington, New Zealand on 23rd March 1955, where he still lives. He travelled to Papua New Guinea at the outset of the blockade and visited the island twice ten years later; once, to visit the New Zealand Peacekeeping mission, the second time to stay with Sam Kauona, the military leader of the Bougainville Revolutionary Army. He is a graduate of Victoria University. In 1988 he won the Katherine Mansfield Memorial Fellowship; in 2007 he won the Commonwealth Writers’ Overall Prize for Best Book Award for Mister Pip. From August 2007 he will spend a year in Berlin as beneficiary of the Creative New Zealand Berlin Writers’ Residency.

For further information on Lloyd Jones or interview requests please contact: Nikki Barrow at John Murray on 020 7873 6440 or email nikki.barrow@johnmurrays.co.uk
On Chesil Beach by Ian McEwan

Jonathan Cape, £12.99

It is July 1962. In a hotel on the Dorset coast, overlooking Chesil Beach, Edward and Florence, who got married that morning, are sitting down to dinner in their room. Bound by the protocols of the era neither is entirely able to suppress their anxieties about the wedding night to come. A subtle exploration of the sexual politics of a bygone age where lives are transformed by a gesture not made or a word not spoken.

Ian McEwan was born on 21st June 1948 in Aldershot. His novels include The Cement Garden, The Comfort of Strangers (shortlisted for The Booker Prize in 1981), A Child in Time, The Innocent, Black Dogs (shortlisted for The Booker Prize in 1992), The Daydreamer, Enduring Love (which has since been made into a film starring Daniel Craig and Rhys Ifans), Amsterdam (winner of the Booker Prize in 1998) and Atonement (shortlisted for The Man Booker Prize in 2001) which has recently been made in to a film starring Keira Knightley. He has also written collections of short stories including First Love, Last Rites and several film scripts. Ian McEwan lives in Oxford.

For further information on Ian McEwan or interviews please contact: Christian Lewis at Jonathan Cape on 020 7840 8539 or email: clewis@randomhouse.co.uk
Animal’s People by Indra Sinha

Simon & Schuster, £11.99

Ever since That Night, the residents of Khaufpur have lived a perilous existence. Their world is poisoned. Nobody has received compensation or help for the chemical leak, least of all Animal, as he is known, whose spine twisted at a young age, leaving him to walk on all fours. Though he inhabits a dark kind of half-life, he knows what love is. When Elli Barber arrives, an ‘Amrikan’ keen to set up a free clinic to help the victims of the disaster, deep suspicion arises amongst the community. Animal resolves to turn the situation to his advantage and starts to investigate Elli’s motives.

Indra Sinha was born in India on 10th February 1950 and spent his childhood in Bombay, Hyderabad and Rajasthan. As a copywriter for Collett Dickenson Pearce he won awards in every major advertising show. His previous work, The Cybergypsies, met with widespread critical acclaim and his is now a full time writer, living in France with his family. He lives with his wife and children in southern France.

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Review of Douglas Coupland's 'The Gum Thief'

The Gum ThiefBy Douglas Coupland. 275 pages. $24.95; £10.99, Bloomsbury.

Tolstoy thought that "The Seagull" was a terrible play, and that Chekhov should never have put a writer in it. "There aren't many of us, and no one is really interested," Tolstoy told a friend. Yet over the decades memorable protagonists in books as different as "Cakes and Ale," "Misery," "The Information," "Lunar Park" and Philip Roth's Zuckerman novels have been writers. And if Tolstoy's fellow Russians had paid attention to him, there would be no "Doctor Zhivago," no "Master and Margarita" and no "Pale Fire." Fiction is drawn to writers for its heroes, and to writing itself for its subject matter.

Douglas Coupland's new novel, "The Gum Thief," puts the act of writing center stage. The book is not conventionally narrated, but told obliquely, through an assemblage of writings and letters, from which the reader reconstructs the story like the pieces of an Ikea wardrobe.

The book's central character is a thwarted writer. Puffy-looking, 40-something Roger is lost, stuck, divorced and sleep-walking through a job he despises at Staples. Roger is a closed, clamlike soul, trailing a U-Haul of emotional baggage and dosing himself with vodka to get through the day. He's a version of the person you often see in coffee shops, sitting alone, nursing a cold Americano and urgently filling a yellow legal pad with screeds of confessional material written in capital letters. Peering over his shoulder as you pass his chair, you find yourself trying to read what he's written and wondering: madman? bore? genius?

Read the full review on iht.com here.

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Re-make/Re-model: Art, Pop, Fashion and the Making of Roxy Music, 1952-1972

Re-make/Re-model: Art, Pop, Fashion and the Making of Roxy Music, 1952-1972

Michael Bracewell Faber & Faber, 400pp, £20

Roxy Music, circa 1972, were a singularly strange group. Far from the laid-back musical proposition of later hits and Bryan Ferry's solo oeuvre, their first album was a thing, by turns, of raging, propulsive energy and addled, neurasthenic sentiment. TV footage from that period (on the cusp, as Michael Bracewell puts it, of their "imperial" phase) reveals a band whose sheer manic blare - not to mention a certain extraterrestrial coquetry - left shuffling, denim-wearing audiences open-mouthed at their audacity. Most strikingly, in a period when laborious dues- pay ing was a mark of musical authenticity, Roxy seemed entirely sui generis. Despite the singer's apparently having taken himself for the offspring of Marlene Dietrich and Johnnie Ray, they looked and sounded like nothing on earth.

Re-make/Re-model tells the story of how Ferry and company came to that iconic pass; then it stops dead, before their album Roxy Music is even released. Where the average rock-band biography describes a dismally familiar story arc - camaraderie and ambition giving way to anomie and sloth, diminishing narrative returns matching plummeting creative pros pects - Bracewell has brilliantly sidestepped all of that in favour of a prehistory of the whole Roxy milieu and a study, in a sense, of the creative potential of the scene as such. Extensive interviews with the principals and their numerous associates serve to reconstruct (amazingly, for any book about pop music) the collective invention of the Roxy moment. What emerges - slowly, forensically, stylishly - is nothing less than a portrait of cultural possibilities in Britain during the postwar period.

Dutiful mention of the subject's attendance at art school has become a cliché of the 1960s/ 1970s rock-star profile (John Lennon, Pete Townshend) without the writer, generally, having much of a clue what transpired at said institution. Bracewell, however, knows precisely what went on, and what it meant: his account of the creative and intellectual archipelago of British art schools in the 1960s would be fascinating enough, without the added allure of Ferry, Brian Eno and Andy Mackay. What set those "hyper-stylised, imperiously aloof" young men apart was the ravenousness with which they devoured ideas: Ferry from Rita Donagh and Richard Hamilton at Newcastle University; Mackay from visiting compos- ers such as Morton Feldman at Reading; Eno, at Ipswich, from the cybernetic experiments of Roy Ascott.

In 1969, the gloriously egoistic Eno wrote to his diary: "I was a teenage art school." This sense of omnivorous learning, of the artist as experimental nexus for images, ideas and attitudes, would be essential to the achieved entity of Roxy Music. Influences as diverse as Duchamp, Phil Spector, Warhol, doo-wop, the Velvet Underground and English music hall would all make it into the ravishing mix. A veritable movement of artists and designers would convene to contrive the band's preening, feathered, retro-futurist look. But Bracewell shows, too, how Roxy harked back (via aesthete advisers such as their publicist Simon Puxley and historian Jeremy Catto) to a deeper, more traditional strand of English dandyism. Their idea of pop success seemed to have been borrowed from Walter Pater's instruction at the end of The Renaissance: to burn always with a hard, gemlike flame.

It is no surprise, then, that Bracewell's working title was apparently Roxyism. The band itself was an idea, a movement, a design for life. It's easy, at this remove, and in light of the group's later falling away from this exacting ideal, to paint the Roxyist aesthetic as merely aspirational or naively, even laughably, faux-sophisticate. But their mid-1970s audience - haughty lasses in Waaf uniforms and stilettos, etiolated boys with a taste for electronics and eye-shadow - went on to invent punk and post-punk, to imagine new ways of being between art, music, fashion and literature. In the mid-1980s, a decade and more after its release, Roxy Music was still being passed around classrooms like an invitation to join some secret aesthetic society. Eno, especially, still remains an inspirational figure.

Perhaps because both futurism and nostalgia were always built into their sonic and visual fantasies, because they were so studiedly not of their time, Roxy Music seem immune to the kind of easy periodisation and crude revivalism that plagues rock bands today. (Of their contemporaries, only Kraftwerk have this peculiar quality.) They are in this sense the perfect subject for Bracewell, whose essays, fiction and art criticism have long been concerned with the still resonant, utopian potential of the cultural artefacts of the recent past. Re-make/Re-model is certainly a marvellous book about art, music, ideas and Englishness. But Bracewell's particular, uncanny achievement is to have brought his subjects to the brink of a future that, however familiar, seems suddenly unpredictable once more. As Simon Puxley's sleeve note asked in 1972: what's the date again?

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