The Indian poet Jeet Thayil has made the Booker shortlist for his first novel, Narcopolis. Photograph: Murdo Macleod
Novelists who struggled long and hard just to get their books into the shops after a string of rejections by big publishers have joined the more established literary names of Hilary Mantel and Will Self on a Man Booker shortlist which this year celebrates "the power and depth of prose."
The six books in contention for the £50,000 prize came from what the chair of judges, Peter Stothard, called "an exhilarating year for fiction – the strongest, I would say, for more than a decade".
Mantel's Bring Up the Bodies, a follow-up to her 2009 Booker-winning Wolf Hall, is now one bookmaker's favourite to take a prize that would make her the first British novelist to win more than once. Judges had compared it to her first instalment of the Thomas Cromwell story and "noted her even greater mastery of the method", said Stothard.
Ladbrokes made it 9/4 favourite but it is far from a shoo-in. She faces Self's widely admired novel Umbrella; books from two debut novelists in the shape of Jeet Thayil and Alison Moore; and two novelists – Tan Twan Eng and Deborah Levy – who have been rejected time and again by mainstream publishers.
Tan is shortlisted for his second book, The Garden of Evening Mists, a beautifully immersive story of love and guilt which takes readers on a slow journey through the brutal second world war Japanese occupation of Malaya, the post-war emergency and more recent settled times. Stothard said the book's central character, Aritomo, once Hirohito's gardener, was "one of the most memorable characters in all the 30,000 or so pages we've read this year".
Tan is published by the small Newcastle-based company Myrmidon and he recalled on Tuesday just how many times his first novel, The Gift of Rain, had been rejected.
"I was turned down by almost all the publishers in the UK. They said it was difficult to market and they didn't know what to do with it and it was Myrmidon who were brave enough to take a chance on me."
He said there was no bitterness. "I quite understand it – I'm an outsider so to break into the British publishing scene takes a lot of work and a lot of perseverance. I quite understand that when publishers are confronted with something slightly different they would balk at the extra step they might have to take to market the book."
Full comments at The Guardian
The six books in contention for the £50,000 prize came from what the chair of judges, Peter Stothard, called "an exhilarating year for fiction – the strongest, I would say, for more than a decade".
Mantel's Bring Up the Bodies, a follow-up to her 2009 Booker-winning Wolf Hall, is now one bookmaker's favourite to take a prize that would make her the first British novelist to win more than once. Judges had compared it to her first instalment of the Thomas Cromwell story and "noted her even greater mastery of the method", said Stothard.
Ladbrokes made it 9/4 favourite but it is far from a shoo-in. She faces Self's widely admired novel Umbrella; books from two debut novelists in the shape of Jeet Thayil and Alison Moore; and two novelists – Tan Twan Eng and Deborah Levy – who have been rejected time and again by mainstream publishers.
Tan is shortlisted for his second book, The Garden of Evening Mists, a beautifully immersive story of love and guilt which takes readers on a slow journey through the brutal second world war Japanese occupation of Malaya, the post-war emergency and more recent settled times. Stothard said the book's central character, Aritomo, once Hirohito's gardener, was "one of the most memorable characters in all the 30,000 or so pages we've read this year".
Tan is published by the small Newcastle-based company Myrmidon and he recalled on Tuesday just how many times his first novel, The Gift of Rain, had been rejected.
"I was turned down by almost all the publishers in the UK. They said it was difficult to market and they didn't know what to do with it and it was Myrmidon who were brave enough to take a chance on me."
He said there was no bitterness. "I quite understand it – I'm an outsider so to break into the British publishing scene takes a lot of work and a lot of perseverance. I quite understand that when publishers are confronted with something slightly different they would balk at the extra step they might have to take to market the book."
Full comments at The Guardian
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