To celebrate 50 years of the Man Booker Prize, Shiny New Books is reviewing the winners by decade. Read my review of Last Orders by Graham Swift.
Read More50 Years of the Man Booker Prize
Posts tagged man booker prize
The Spinning Heart by Donal Ryan
OK, how good is this opening paragraph? My father still lives back in the road past the weir in the cottage I was reared in. I go there every day to see is he dead and every day he lets me down. He hasn’t yet missed a day of letting me down. He smiles at me; that terrible smile. He knows I’m coming to check is he dead. He knows I know he knows. He laughs his crooked laugh. I ask is he okay for everything and he only laughs…. Read More
The Sense of an Ending, explained
First, some background: last year I wrote a review of The Sense of an Ending by Julian Barnes. I had a lot of comments from people who didn’t understand the ending, and since then I’ve been inundated with people searching for things like “Sense of an Ending explained”. I felt bad, because my original review didn’t really answer that question. So this post directly addresses the ending of the book and attempts to clear up any confusion. If you haven’t read the book and don’t want to know the end,… Read More
Booker longlist
Here are the 13 longlisted books for this year’s Man Booker Prize: Julian Barnes The Sense of an Ending (Jonathan Cape – Random House) Sebastian Barry On Canaan’s Side (Faber) Carol Birch Jamrach’s Menagerie (Canongate Books) Patrick deWitt The Sisters Brothers (Granta) Esi Edugyan Half Blood Blues (Serpent’s Tail – Profile) Yvvette Edwards A Cupboard Full of Coats (Oneworld) Alan Hollinghurst The Stranger’s Child (Picador – Pan Macmillan) Stephen Kelman Pigeon English (Bloomsbury) Patrick McGuinness The Last Hundred Days (Seren Books) A.D. Miller Snowdrops (Atlantic) Alison Pick Far to Go… Read More
Finding the ‘Lost Booker’
So it seems that due to a procedural anomaly, a whole year’s worth of novels missed out on being considered for the Booker Prize. This is being remedied by a retroactive award, with a shortlist of novels from 1970 being drawn up by three judges and then a public vote to decide the winner. I think this is interesting – partly for a window onto a year’s writing (lots of names I recognise, but not a single book I’ve read), but also for raising questions of how we judge literature…. Read More