Previously I wrote a post about the Booker Prize 2011 Short List. It was announced today (October 18th) that Julian Barnes won for his novel, The Sense of an Ending. The Guardian has a very nice article about the win and the controversy over the list regarding “populism over quality”.
Here are the books that didn’t make the short list this year – many of which are on my list to read.
A Cupboard Full of Coats by Yvvette Edwards: Yvvette Edwards is an East Londoner whose mother is from the Caribbean. Her debut novel is set in the world and culture she is very familiar w and grew up in multi-ethnic working class London.
Fourteen years after her mother’s murder, Jinx answers her door and finds “Lemon” who tells her the murder has been released from jail.”Lemon” was previously involved with her mother and is somewhat mysterious. The novel takes place in the next three days as Jinx looks back at her mother who choose to stay in an abusive relationship and this look into the past forces her to reexamine her own relationship with her son.
Availability in the USA: Available in Kindle, paperback and audio editions.
The Guardian and The Telegraph had short reviews of this novel and differed in opinion. The Telegraph states, “A light touch stops the novel being overwrought. ” And The Guardian writes, “Booker long listings cause intense scrutiny and can do a book a disservice; readable as this one undoubtedly is, the quality of writing and structure make its inclusion a surprise. ”
Blog Reviews:
Derby Day by DJ Taylor: Taylor, a biographer of both Thackeray and Orwell, returns to his familiar 19th century in his latest novel. While the literary critic has received a prize for his biography, this is his first nomination for the BookerPrize
Derby Day reflects the 19th century novels it is patterned after with many characters, mysteries, and action which all culminates in Derby Day at Epsom Downs.
Availability in the USA: Hardcover April 1, 2012
From a review in The Independent:
Taylor’s second “Victorian Mystery” reads like a 19th-century great with the extraneous detail filleted out. His portrait of mid-century folk, however, is not an edifying one. Daughters are ready to bump off fathers, husbands to exploit wives, and everyone is happy to chance their assets on the wheel of fortune. While sentimentality might take a tumble, Taylor’s novel keeps us gripped until the last furlong.
Blog Review:
The Testament of Jessie Lamb by Jane Rodgers: Rodgers is a novelist, screenwriter, editor, and lecturers. The Testament of Jessie Lamb is her eighth novel and first to be nominated.
While I haven’t always followed the Booker Prize, I cannot remember another dystopian novel making the list since Never Let Me Go in 2005. Dystopian novels tend to be set in the near or unspecified future and explore repressive societies, the techniques they use to keep the population under control, and how individuals and groups try to survive and overcome the conditions they find themselves in.
The Testament of Jessie Lamb explores such a society where pregnant women are dying of an unspecified disease. Jessie is a sixteen year old girl at first uninterested in this and later becomes more thoughtful about the implications of this disease and her own actions about a potential solution. Her father, a geneticist working on the problem, becomes concerned and imprisons her. The novel centers around the idea of the young voluntarily deciding to die in order to save the rest of mankind – a theme which is more typically discussed in war novels feature males.
Availability in the USA: No information available
From a review in The Independent:
The scary thing about this novel is that the questions it raises are so close to home. Must women always be the victims and the fall guys? Are Sleeping Beauties so different from young men volunteering for war? What happens, as Jessie’s mum asks, once we accept that individuals can be sacrificed? Can one person make a difference? Why aren’t we doing anything? The novel does not set up an elaborate apocalypse, but astringently strips away the smears hiding the apocalypses we really face. Like Jessie’s, it is a small, calm voice of reason in a nonsensical world.
Blog Reviews:
The Last Hundred Days by Patrick McGuinness: McGuinness was born in Tunisia and has lived in South America, Iran, and Europe including Romania. He is a professor of Comparative Literature and a published poet. The author drew on his experiences in Romania in the writing of his first novel.
This novel focuses on the experiences of an English student who begins a job in Bucharest during the last days of Ceausecu’s regime. The shops are empty and there is paranoia and secret service men everywhere. The novel depicts in detail the everyday life of Romanians during this turning point in history.
Availability in the USA: No information available
From a review in the Times Literary Supplement:
The Last Hundred Days is an ambitious work, at ease with intimacy as well as with the sudden eruption of crowd scenes as the regime disintegrates and re-forms itself. It manages to be both funny and horrifying, sceptical but not fatally poisoned by the encounter. Above all, the sardonic crispness and evocative power of its language distinguish it from the run of contemporary fiction.
Blog Reviews
Far to Go by Allison Pick: Pick is a Canadian author also known for her poetry. Far to Go is her second novel.
Set in Czechoslovakia after the Germans invade in WWII, Far to Go is about an affluent, secular Jewish family who are caught up in the turmoil and struggle to survive. They flee to Prague with their six year old and their nanny. In the turmoil there are betrayals and separations with the six year old finding a place on the Kindertransport which sent Jewish children to England.
Availability in the USA: Available on Kindle and in Paperback
From a review in The National Post:
Pick’s father’s parents were assimilated Jews who fled Czechoslovakia in 1941, settled in Canada and converted to Christianity. In the course of writing this novel, the author converted to Judaism. In an interview she said: “Originally, the impetus was to connect to all these beautiful traditions that had been lost. It felt like a good fit. It was very organic.” So the Holocaust persists in the literary imagination and through the refining fire of fiction a new generation confronts its own version of what it means to be human.
Blog Reviews:
On Canaan’s Side by Sebastian Barry: On Canaan’s Side is the Irish novelist, playwright, and poet’s fifth novel and third to be nominated for the Booker Prize. In 2008, his novel The Secret Scripture was a favorite to win but ultimately wasn’t chosen.
This novel spans seven years and explores memory, family, war, and connections. Lilly Bere is mourning the death of her grandson and reflecting back over her life. She fled Ireland after WWI and emigrated to the United States. The book ranges from her early life, the loss of her mother and brother, and the fear that follows her to her new life in the USA.
Availability in the USA: Available Available on Kindle and in Hardcover
From a review in The Guardian:
Barry’s prose is overwhelmingly poetic, its lyricism yielding a seemingly endless series of potent and moving images … This concentration on isolating tiny fragments of experience and apprehension makes for an intense and immersive read, one in which brutal events are cast in a diffuse light that gives them an almost mythic quality. But the narrative’s dreamlike qualities do not eclipse Barry’s determination to scrutinise the less travelled byways of history and to give a voice to their buffeted, battered but nonetheless enduring victims.
Blog Reviews:
The Stranger’s Child by Alan Hollinghurst: This is the second nomination for the British novelist, editor, and translator. He previously won in 2004 for The Line of Beauty. The Stranger’s Child is his fifth novel.
In the late summer of 1913, Cambridge student, wealthy poet Cecil Valance goes to stay at the family home of his friend George Sawle. The weekend visit is one of excitement and confusion and has a lasting impact on George’s sixteen year old sister. Over the following decades the memories, impacts and legends of that weekend grow as Daphne ages.
Availability in the USA: Available Available on Kindle and in Hardcover
From a review in The Times:
With this book it becomes clear how unified Hollinghurst’s aesthetic has been so far. And aesthetics, always a matter of ideology, point to the fiercely yet subtly political heart of the book: in a daring act of appropriation he has interpolated within a history of textual ellipses, lacunae and silences a secret history of homosexuality, of what can and cannot be articulated at different historical junctures.
Blog Reviews:
Reflections from the Hinterland 
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