It is that time of the year when those of us over focused on Book Award World go all trembly as the Man Booker Prize Shortlist Fest looms. The strongest long list for many a long year- the Booker is back after a few dodgy seasons.
As usual Tragic is going to make a complete and utter wally of himself and have a stab a picking the shortlist. Yes, shear folly, but what the hell. Would like to see Sarah Hall do well as love her work, but rather suspect it could be J.M. Coetzee's year with Hilary Mantel a good outside bet.
As per usual the Bookies in the UK are offering odds - such a well read lot. Shorts due September 8th.
Book links to the venerable Blackwell Books in the UK. Tragic maintains a Man Booker award summary page at
Literary Awards UK.
Tragic Picks
3/1 - Coetzee, J M,
Summertime, Random House
ISBN: 9781846553189 -
10/1 - Byatt, AS,
The Children's Book, Random House - Chatto and Windus -
ISBN: 9780701183899
12/1 - Hall, Sarah,
How to paint a dead man, Faber and Faber -
ISBN: 9780571224890
16/1 Mantel, Hilary,
Wolf Hall, HarperCollins - Fourth Estate -
6/1 - Toibin, Colm,
Brooklyn, Penguin -
ISBN: 9780670918126-
5/1 Waters, Sarah,
The Little Stranger, Little, Brown - Virago -
ISBN: 9781844086023
Longlisted titles
Byatt, AS, The Children's Book, Random House - Chatto and Windus -ISBN: 9780701183899 - Olive Wellwood is a famous writer. For each of them she writes a separate private book, bound in different colours and placed on a shelf. In their house near Romney Marsh they play in a story-book world - but their lives, and those of their cousins, children of a city stockbroker, are already inscribed with mystery. More
Coetzee, J M, Summertime, Random House ISBN: 9781846553189 - Harvill Secker - A young English biographer is working on a book about the late writer, John Coetzee. He plans to focus on the years from 1972-1977 when Coetzee, in his thirties, is sharing a run-down cottage in the suburbs of Cape Town with his widowed father. This, the biographer senses, is the period when he was 'finding his feet as a writer'. Never having met Coetzee, he embarks on a series of interviews with people who were important to him - a married woman with whom he had an affair, his favourite cousin Margot, a Brazilian dancer whose daughter had English lessons with him, former friends and colleagues. More
Foulds, Adam, The Quickening Maze, Random House - Jonathan Cape - ISBN: 9780224087469 - Based on real events in Epping Forest on the edge of London around 1840, "The Quickening Maze" centres on the first incarceration of the great nature poet John Clare. After years struggling with alcohol, critical neglect and depression, Clare finds himself in High Beach Private Asylum - an institution run on reformist principles which would later become known as occupational therapy. At the same time another poet, the young Alfred Tennyson, moves nearby and becomes entangled in the life and catastrophic schemes of the asylum's owner, the peculiar, charismatic Dr Matthew Allen. For John Clare,more
Hall, Sarah, How to paint a dead man, Faber and Faber -ISBN: 9780571224890- Italy in the early 1960s: a dying painter considers the sacrifices and losses that have made him an enigma, both to strangers and those closest to him. He begins his last life painting, using the same objects he has painted obsessively for his entire career - a small group of bottles. In Cumbria 30 years later, a landscape artist - and admirer of the Italian recluse - finds himself trapped in the extreme terrain that has made him famous. More
Harvey, Samantha, The Wilderness, Random House - Jonathan Cape - It's Jake's birthday. He is sitting in a small plane, being flown over the landscape that has been the backdrop to his life - his childhood, his marriage, his work, his passions. Now he is in his early sixties, and he isn't quite the man he used to be. He has lost his wife, his son is in prison, and he is about to lose his past. Jake has Alzheimer's. As the disease takes hold of him, Jake struggles to hold on to his personal story, to his memories and identity, but they become increasingly elusive and unreliable. What happened to his daughter? Is she alive, or long dead? More
Lever, James, Me Cheeta, HarperCollins - Fourth Estate -ISBN: 9780007280162 - The incredible, moving and hilarious story of Cheeta the Chimp, simian star of the big screen, on a behind-the-scenes romp through the golden years of Hollywood. The greatest Hollywood Tarzan, Johnny Weissmuller, died in 1984. Maureen O'Sullivan, his Jane, died in 1998. Weissmuller's son, who first played Boy in the 1939 film 'Tarzan Finds a Mate', has gone too. But Cheeta the Chimp, who starred with them all, is alive and well, retired in Palm Springs as an abstract painter. At the incredible age of seventy-six, he is by far the oldest living chimpanzee ever recorded. More
Mantel, Hilary, Wolf Hall, HarperCollins - Fourth Estate - Lock Cromwell in a deep dungeon in the morning,' says Thomas More, 'and when you come back that night he'll be sitting on a plush cushion eating larks' tongues, and all the gaolers will owe him money.' England, the 1520s. Henry VIII is on the throne, but has no heir. Cardinal Wolsey is his chief advisor, charged with securing the divorce the pope refuses to grant. Into this atmosphere of distrust and need comes Thomas Cromwell, first as Wolsey's clerk, and later his successor. Cromwell is a wholly original man: the son of a brutal blacksmith, a political genius, a briber, a charmer, a bully, a man with a delicate and deadly expertise in manipulating people and events. More
Mawer, Simon, The Glass Room, Little, Brown -Cool. Balanced. Modern. The precisions of science, the wild variance of lust, the catharsis of confession and the fear of failure - these are things that happen in the Glass Room. High on a Czechoslovak hill, the Landauer House shines as a wonder of steel and glass and onyx built specially for newlyweds Viktor and Liesel Landauer, a Jew married to a gentile. But the radiant honesty of 1930 that the house, with its unique Glass Room, seems to engender quickly tarnishes as the storm clouds of WW2 gather, and eventually the family must flee, accompanied by Viktor's lover and her child. More
O'Loughlin, Ed, Not Untrue & Not Unkind, Penguin - Ireland - In Dublin, a newspaper editor called Cartwright is found dead. One of his colleagues, Owen Simmons, discovers a dossier on Cartwright's desk. And in the dossier Owen finds a photograph, which brings him back to a dusty road in Africa and to the woman he once loved! "Not Untrue and Not Unkind" is Owen's story - a gripping story of friendship, rivalry and betrayal amongst a group of journalists and photographers covering Africa's wars. It is an astonishingly powerful and accomplished debut that immediately establishes Ed O'Loughlin as a mature master of the novel form. More
Scudamore, James, Heliopolis, Random House - ISBN: 9781846551888 - Harvill Secker - Born in a Sao Paulo shantytown, Ludo undergoes a remarkable transformation. Directed by forces beyond his control, he first leaves, then returns to the vast city of his birth - but on the opposite side of its social divide. Now twenty-seven, he works for a vacuous 'communications company', marketing unwanted, unaffordable products aimed at the very underclass into which he was born. He has developed an obsessive, adulterous love for his adoptive sister, whose husband is his only friend. And he has an appetite that can never be satisfied. More
Toibin, Colm, Brooklyn, Penguin -ISBN: 9780670918126- Viking In a small town in the south-east of Ireland in the 1950s, Eilis Lacey is one among many of her generation who cannot find work at home. So when a job is offered in America, it is clear that she must go. Leaving her family and home, Eilis sets off to forge a new life for herself in Brooklyn. Young, homesick and alone, she gradually buries the pain of parting beneath the rhythms of a new life - days at the till in a large department store, night classes in Brooklyn College and Friday evenings on the dance floor of the parish hall - until she realizes that she has found a sort of happiness. More
Trevor, William, Love and Summer, Penguin - Viking -ISBN: 9780670918249 - It's summer and nothing much is happening in Rathmoye. So it doesn't go unnoticed when a dark-haired stranger appears on his bicycle and begins photographing the mourners at Mrs Connulty's funeral. Florian Kilderry couldn't know that the Connultys were said to own half the town; and, in any case, he had come to Rathmoye only to see the scorched remains of the cinema. But Mrs Connulty's daughter, liberated at last by the death of her imperious mother, resolves to keep an eye on Florian Kilderry, and it's she who comes to witness the events that follow. More
Waters, Sarah, The Little Stranger, Little, Brown - Virago -ISBN: 9781844086023 - After her award-winning trilogy of Victorian novels, Sarah Waters turned to the 1940s and wrote THE NIGHT WATCH, a tender and tragic novel set against the backdrop of wartime Britain. Shortlisted for both the Orange and the Man Booker, it went straight to number one in the bestseller chart. In a dusty post-war summer in rural Warwickshire, a doctor is called to a patient at Hundreds Hall. Home to the Ayres family for over 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. More
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A vignette, nothing more.
Tragic was approached by two serious looking matronly women in town this morning, one of whom he knows vaguely through literary social circles.
"That's him" said she, pointing with purpose as they closed in with menace , " The one who does literary award reporting and website stuff that I told you about, you know the one with the interesting wife".
The second woman, who looked like she had just eaten a lemon, put her hand on Tragic's arm and squeezed with an East German Shotputter grip, " What are you reading now then, something high n'arty no doubt?"
Somewhat taken aback Tragic was just a tad off-balance, particularly given the slight hint of the personal vindictive in her voice, but found a satisfying retort.
" Ah", he responded nodding wisely, "thank you for asking. Actually through my contacts in America I am privvy to the winner of the next Pulitzer Prize for Fiction and have just pre-ordered a copy. It is out in the next week or so".
" No", they chorused, and then the shotputter a little more hesitantly. " Are you at liberty to tell us? The l
adies at the Book Club would be so impressed".
Tragic glanced around conspiratorially before leaning closer right into the rosewater whiff realm.
" Dan Brown, The Lost Symbol - can't say another word. Farewell Ladies. Keep it to yourselves. It is the most dangerous kind of knowledge."
Tragic glanced over his shoulder as he departed just in time to witness the two scurrying into the local book store where Tragic himself had just purchased a copy of Olive Kitteridge by Elizabeth Strout.
There will be hell to pay at some stage but it was still a sweet moment.
