Read snippets of our reviews of the books on this year's Booker Prize shortlist, including Hilary Mantel's Bring Up The Bodies.
Hilary Mantel, Will Self and Tan
Twan Eng's books have all been shortlisted for the 2012 Booker Prize.
The Man Booker Prize shortlist:
"Anyone who’s been on a villa holiday will recognise the tensions that
permeate Levy’s stealthily devastating book. Sex and violence are never far from
the surface. Levy is a keenly attentive writer, alive to the hyperreal nature of
things, her prose achieving a hallucinatory quality as things seem to float out
of the characters’ minds and into the text."
"Having conjured Henry’s brainy bovver-boy Thomas Cromwell from his own tomb
in her Man Booker winner Wolf Hall (2009), Mantel now does the same service for
Anne Boleyn. Bring Up the Bodies might be a fiction, but it is more transparent
than those high-narrative histories which cherry-pick their evidence and then
fill in factual gaps with educated imaginative leaps."
Read our interview with Hilary Mantel
:: Alison Moore – The Lighthouse
"Moore’s novel takes the tale of an ordinary, forgettable man, and shows how terrible things happen in the most unassuming surroundings. She conveys the poignancy of small details and delineates perfectly the desperation of unhappy relationships, their mute hostilities and sudden flares. It is this accumulation of the quotidian, in prose as tight as Magnus Mills’s, which lends Moore’s book its standout nature. "
:: Will Self – Umbrella
"The narrative, which has no breaks or chapters, moves between strands without warning, in subtle shifts that occur from one sentence to the next. Each leap jolts the reader unexpectedly out of kilter. The novel is stuffed with ephemera, but luckily, its overabundance of imagery and sheer verbiage can be made to seem part of its subject matter. Self’s refusal to explicate for the reader makes it occasionally arduous going, but it is refreshing to read a book that makes demands rather than “unpacking” itself."
:: Tan Twan Eng – The Garden Of Evening Mists
"The Malaysian writer Tan Twan Eng is an exception in what is generally an Anglo-centric list. His first novel, The Gift of Rain, was described in the Telegraph as an eccentric debut but was none the less longlisted for the Booker Prize. His second book, published by small press Myrmidon, is set in Malaya in 1949 and follows Yun Ling Teoh, a lawyer who has survived a Japanese prisoner of war camp."
:: Jeet Thayil – Narcopolis
"Centred on a squalid drug shack in Bombay, this portmanteau novel picks up strands, weaves them with others, journeys to Mao’s China, only to drop us back, mesmerised, right where we began. Ultimately this is a novel of escape. And while this is hardly a groundbreaking interpretation of narcotic abuse, Thayil subtly inhabits lives destined to forever end back to the pipe."
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Read our interview with Hilary Mantel
:: Alison Moore – The Lighthouse
"Moore’s novel takes the tale of an ordinary, forgettable man, and shows how terrible things happen in the most unassuming surroundings. She conveys the poignancy of small details and delineates perfectly the desperation of unhappy relationships, their mute hostilities and sudden flares. It is this accumulation of the quotidian, in prose as tight as Magnus Mills’s, which lends Moore’s book its standout nature. "
:: Will Self – Umbrella
"The narrative, which has no breaks or chapters, moves between strands without warning, in subtle shifts that occur from one sentence to the next. Each leap jolts the reader unexpectedly out of kilter. The novel is stuffed with ephemera, but luckily, its overabundance of imagery and sheer verbiage can be made to seem part of its subject matter. Self’s refusal to explicate for the reader makes it occasionally arduous going, but it is refreshing to read a book that makes demands rather than “unpacking” itself."
:: Tan Twan Eng – The Garden Of Evening Mists
"The Malaysian writer Tan Twan Eng is an exception in what is generally an Anglo-centric list. His first novel, The Gift of Rain, was described in the Telegraph as an eccentric debut but was none the less longlisted for the Booker Prize. His second book, published by small press Myrmidon, is set in Malaya in 1949 and follows Yun Ling Teoh, a lawyer who has survived a Japanese prisoner of war camp."
:: Jeet Thayil – Narcopolis
"Centred on a squalid drug shack in Bombay, this portmanteau novel picks up strands, weaves them with others, journeys to Mao’s China, only to drop us back, mesmerised, right where we began. Ultimately this is a novel of escape. And while this is hardly a groundbreaking interpretation of narcotic abuse, Thayil subtly inhabits lives destined to forever end back to the pipe."
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