Today the shortlist for the Man Booker Prize 2009 was announced. The panel of five judges originally started out with 132 books, narrowed it down to the longlist of 13 and today the shortlist consists of six novels. The winner will finally be announced October 6, 2009. The Booker Prize also has a great website with author interviews, past prize winner lists, and mention of upcoming novels.
The Children’s Book by A.S. Byatt, October 1, 2009
A spellbinding novel, at once sweeping and intimate, from the Booker Prize-winning author of “Possession,” spans the Victorian era through the World War I years, and centers around a famous children’s book author and the passions, betrayals, and secrets that tear apart the people she loves. See my blog for more info. You’ll see that I really love this book.
Summertime by J. M. Coetzee, January 1, 2010
A young English biographer is researching a book about the late South African writer John Coetzee, focusing on Coetzee in his thirties, at a time when he was living in a rundown cottage in the Cape Town suburbs with his widowed father-a time, the biographer is convinced, when Coetzee was finding himself as a writer. Never having met the man himself, the biographer interviews five people who knew Coetzee well, including a married woman with whom he had an affair, his cousin Margot, and a Brazilian dancer whose daughter took English lessons with him. These accounts add up to an image of an awkward, reserved, and bookish young man who finds it hard to make meaningful connections with the people around him.
“Summertime” is an inventive and inspired work of fiction that allows J.M. Coetzee to imagine his own life with a critical and unsparing eye, revealing painful moral struggles and attempts to come to grips with what it means to care for another human being. Incisive, elegant, and often surprisingly funny, “Summertime” is a compelling work by one of today’s most esteemed writers.
The Quickening Maze by Adam Cape Foulds, not yet released in the U.S.
From 1837 to 1841, John Clare, the peasant poet, was a patient in a private asylum in the Epping Forest. Clare and his wife Patty had six children and life was proving increasingly burdensome to Clare, who began to suffer bouts of severe depression, leading to alarmingly erratic behaviour and serious delusions. In The Quickening Maze, Adam Foulds has written an imaginative recreation of Clare’s years in the High Beech Asylum, and while the result is firmly fictional, the picture presented is realistic and consistent with the known history.
The book is sparsely written. Foulds does not write lengthy descriptive or scene-setting passages, but each small vignette contributes to a rich picture of the cloistered life of a 19th century private asylum.
This is no mad-house. The asylum is run on orderly lines by Dr Matthew Allen, a thoughtful man who likes to get to know his patients. However, the finances of the asylum are precarious and Foulds describes Allen’s attempts to mix the cure of souls with mechanical invention and patents. Poor Allen finds his time increasingly spent trying to “diversify his business”, but without success. Click here to read the full review.
Wolf Hall by Hilary Mantel, October 13, 2009
In the ruthless arena of King Henry VIII’s court, only one man dares to gamble his life to win the king’s favor and ascend to the heights of political power
England in the 1520s is a heartbeat from disaster. If the king dies without a male heir, the country could be destroyed by civil war. Henry VIII wants to annul his marriage of twenty years, and marry Anne Boleyn. The pope and most of Europe opposes him. The quest for the king’s freedom destroys his adviser, the brilliant Cardinal Wolsey, and leaves a power vacuum.
Into this impasse steps Thomas Cromwell. Cromwell is a wholly original man, a charmer and a bully, both idealist and opportunist, astute in reading people and a demon of energy: he is also a consummate politician, hardened by his personal losses, implacable in his ambition. But Henry is volatile: one day tender, one day murderous. Cromwell helps him break the opposition, but what will be the price of his triumph?
In inimitable style, Hilary Mantel presents a picture of a half-made society on the cusp of change, where individuals fight or embrace their fate with passion and courage. With a vast array of characters, overflowing with incident, the novel re-creates an era when the personal and political are separated by a hairbreadth, where success brings unlimited power but a single failure means death.
The Glass Room by Simon Mawer, not yet released in the U.S.
Simon Mawer’s latest book is a historical novel set in Czechoslovakia in the late 1930s. Historical novels are usually possessed of horrid, obvious and multiple weaknesses and flaws – bogus dialogue, fetishistic images and scenes, ignorant conflations: sinister, ersatz entertainment. And although Mawer is the author of a number of rather fine novels – including The Gospel of Judas and The Fall – he is probably best known for his Peter Mayle-ish A Place in Italy (1992). So the omens are not good. And all the initial signs are unpromising: The Glass Room is a book about a culture slipping from decadence into catastrophic decline. It’s a study of a marriage. It concerns itself with art, music, architecture, indignity, loneliness, terror, betrayal, sex. And the Holocaust. It should, therefore, be pretentious, unbearable schlock of the most appalling kind. But it’s not. It is, unexpectedly, a thing of extraordinary beauty and symmetry . . .
The architect employed by Viktor is a man named Rainer von Abt, a disciple of Adolf Loos. “I wish to take Man out of the cave and float him in the air,” Von Abt proclaims. “I wish to give him a glass space to inhabit.” The house, when it is built, has vast windows, an onyx wall, white ceilings and white floors. It is the definitive modern house, for definitive modern people. Viktor is a great believer in inovace and pokrok – innovation and progress. “Everywhere he takes with him the new creed and proclaims it with all the enthusiasm of a prophet. ‘This is where the world of commerce is leading us,’ he explains. ‘Into a world of peace and trade, where the only battles fought are battles for market share.'” It’s the late 1930s: Viktor is woefully mistaken.
The Glass Room is not merely a piece of architecture within the book: it is the architecture of the book. All the characters interact with and within the house in some way; all plot revelations take place within its shimmering walls; history doesn’t take place outside it, it comes to it. Abandoned by the fleeing Landauers, the Glass Room is taken over by the Nazis for scientific experiments, and then claimed by the communists, before becoming a museum, and the site for a final scene of recognition and redemption. This could easily be over-ingenious or simply absurd, a device ripe for parody. Exactly how Mawer manages to avoid the many potential embarrassments and pitfalls he sets up for himself is worth considering . . .
Click here to read the full review.
The Little Stranger by Sarah Waters, May 2009
A chilling and vividly rendered ghost story set in postwar Britain, by the bestselling and award-winning author of “The Night Watch” and “Fingersmith.”
Sarah Waters’s trilogy of Victorian novels “Tipping the Velvet,” “Affinity,” and “Fingersmith” earned her legions of fans around the world, a number of awards, and a reputation as one of today’s most gifted historical novelists. With her most recent book, “The Night Watch,” Waters turned to the 1940s and delivered a tender and intricate novel of relationships that brought her the greatest success she has achieved so far. With “The Little Stranger,” Waters revisits the fertile setting of Britain in the 1940s-and gives us a sinister tale of a haunted house, brimming with the rich atmosphere and psychological complexity that have become hallmarks of Waters’s work.
“The Little Stranger” follows the strange adventures of Dr. Faraday, the son of a maid who has built a life of quiet respectability as a country doctor. One dusty postwar summer in his home of rural Warwickshire, he is called to a patient at Hundreds Hall. Home to the Ayres family for more than two centuries, the Georgian house, once grand and handsome, is now in decline-its masonry crumbling, its gardens choked with weeds, the clock in its stable yard permanently fixed at twenty to nine. But are the Ayreses haunted by something more ominous than a dying way of life? Little does Dr. Faraday know how closely, and how terrifyingly, their story is about to become entwined with his.
Comments are closed.