At midday on Wednesday, the opening list of runners and riders for Britain’s leading books prize is unleashed on the reading world. Who will it be? Who will it be?
With less than 24 hours to go before the longlist is announced, we’re starting to wonder who’ll make up this year’s Man Booker dozen – even though offering predictions is, in this game of “posh bingo”, as Julian Barnes put it, a bit like filling in your card before the numbers have been called.
In the second year that American authors have been eligible, one obvious contender is Hanya Yanagihara’s epic tearjerker about love, friendship and the effects of childhood abuse: A Little Life is hot off presses in the UK and currently consuming readers on both sides of the Atlantic. Other US novels to look out for include Marilynne Robinson’s Lila, the third in her Gilead series, published to ecstatic reviews last November; a strong debut from Atticus Lish exploring poverty and hard graft in an unforgiving post-crash US, Preparation for the Next Life; plus highly praised novels of New York intellectual life (Ben Lerner’s 10:04), politics and race in Clinton’s Houston (Attica Locke’s Pleasantville) and gothic goings-on in rural Virginia (Sara Taylor’s The Shore).
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In the second year that American authors have been eligible, one obvious contender is Hanya Yanagihara’s epic tearjerker about love, friendship and the effects of childhood abuse: A Little Life is hot off presses in the UK and currently consuming readers on both sides of the Atlantic. Other US novels to look out for include Marilynne Robinson’s Lila, the third in her Gilead series, published to ecstatic reviews last November; a strong debut from Atticus Lish exploring poverty and hard graft in an unforgiving post-crash US, Preparation for the Next Life; plus highly praised novels of New York intellectual life (Ben Lerner’s 10:04), politics and race in Clinton’s Houston (Attica Locke’s Pleasantville) and gothic goings-on in rural Virginia (Sara Taylor’s The Shore).
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