ATTACK BY PUBLISHER ON BOOKER LONGLIST OMISSION

Booker: the novel that made thrillers respectable
From Guardian blogger Laura Barton, July 31, 2008

A predictable flutter of disagreement greeted the announcement of the longlist for the Man Booker prize this week - a list that pitched the latest Salman Rushdie against five first novels, a former Orange winner and a tale of a lost dog, and five others.

Among those to express his surprise was Canongate publisher Jamie Byng, who was disappointed that Canongate's own submission, Helen Garner's The Spare Room, did not appear on the list. He wrote on the Man Booker website forum: "I cannot respect a judging committee that decides to pick a book like Child 44, a fairly well-written and well-paced thriller that is no more than that, over novels as exceptional as Helen Garner's The Spare Room or Ross Raisin's God's Own Country."

Is Child 44 really no more than a "fairly well-written and well-paced thriller"? And is the real issue the fact that there is a thriller on the list at all? Tom Rob Smith's Child 44 is a serial-killer story set in Soviet Russia, in the year of Stalin's death. It received impressive reviews -- this newspaper labelled it "compelling" and "a real achievement" (though cautioned that "the desire for the plot to encompass every element of Soviet history eventually overrides any sense of artistic seriousness") and has already been awarded the CWA Ian Fleming Steel Dagger for the year's best thriller.

For Laura Barton's full report link here.