July 28th, 2011 § 0 comments § permalink
The longlist for the 2011 Man Booker Prize for Fiction has just been announced, two days ago, on 26th of July. The 13-strong longlist for this year’s Man Booker prize were chosen by a panel of five judges chaired by author and former Director-General of MI5, Dame Stella Rimington.
The 13 books on the list are: » Read the rest of this entry «
June 6th, 2011 § 0 comments § permalink
May 19th, 2011 § 0 comments § permalink
Philip Roth has been awarded the Man Booker International Prize for his numerous achievements in literature, beating 12 other short-listed authors, including Britain’s John le Carre, Australia’s David Malouf and Indian-born Canadian Rohinton Mistry. » Read the rest of this entry «
October 30th, 2010 § 0 comments § permalink
Burning Bright by Ron Rash
New York Times bestselling and award-winning author Ron Rash is “a storyteller of the highest rank” (Jeffrey Lent) and has won comparisons to John Steinbeck, Cormac McCarthy, and Gabriel García Márquez. It is rare that an author can capture the complexities of a place as though it were a person, and rarer still that one can reveal a land as dichotomous and fractious as Appalachia a muse; a siren; a rugged, brutal landscape of exceptional beauty, promise, and suffering with the honesty and precision of a photograph. “If you haven’t heard of the Southern writer Ron Rash, it is time you should” (The Plain Dealer).
In Burning Bright, the stories span the years from the Civil War to the present day, and Rash’s historical and modern settings are sewn together in a hauntingly beautiful patchwork of suspense and myth, populated by raw and unforgettable characters mined from the landscape of Appalachia. In “Back of Beyond,” a pawnshop owner who profits from the stolen goods of local meth addicts including his own nephew comes to the aid of his brother and sister-in-law when they are threatened by their son. The pregnant wife of a Lincoln sympathizer alone in Confederate territory takes revenge to protect her family in “Lincolnites.” And in the title story, a woman from a small town marries an outsider; when an unknown arsonist starts fires in the Smoky Mountains, her husband becomes the key suspect.
In these stories, Rash brings to light a previously unexplored territory, hidden in plain sight first a landscape, and then the dark yet lyrical heart and the alluringly melancholy soul of his characters and their home.
Ron Rash
Ron Rash (born 1953), an American poet, short story writer and novelist, is the Parris Distinguished Professor in Appalachian Cultural Studies at Western Carolina University. Rash was born in Chester, South Carolina, in 1953, grew up in Boiling Springs, North Carolina, and is a graduate of Gardner-Webb University and Clemson University. In 1994 he published his first book, a collection of short stories titled The Night the New Jesus Fell to Earth. Since then, Rash has published three collections of poetry, three short story collections, and four novels, all to wide critical acclaim and several awards and honors. Rash’s poems and stories have appeared in more than 100 magazines and journals over the years. With each new book, Rash has confirmed his position as a central and significant Appalachian writer alongside well-established names like Fred Chappell, Lee Smith, and Robert Morgan. Serena, Rash’s latest release, has received favorable reviews nationwide and was a 2009 PEN/Faulkner Award Finalist.
September 13th, 2010 § 0 comments § permalink
C follows the short, intense life of Serge Carrefax, a man who – as his name suggests – surges into the electric modernity of the early twentieth century, transfixed by the technologies that will obliterate him.
Born to the sound of one of the very earliest experimental wireless stations, Serge finds himself steeped in a weird world of transmissions, whose very air seems filled with cryptic and poetic signals of all kinds. When personal loss strikes him in his adolescence, this world takes on a darker and more morbid aspect. What follows is a stunning tour de force in which the eerily idyllic settings of pre-war Europe give way to the exhilarating flightpaths of the frontline aeroplane radio operator, then the prison camps of Germany, the drug-fuelled London of the roaring twenties and, finally, the ancient tombs of Egypt.
Reminiscent of Bolaño, Beckett and Pynchon, this is a remarkable novel – a compelling, sophisticated and sublimely imaginative book uncovering the hidden codes and dark rhythms that sustain life.
Jack is five. He lives in a single room with his Ma. The room is locked. Neither Jack nor Ma have a key.
The novel opens as Jack turns five. Jack has never been outside of Room, as he calls it, and although he and Ma have access to a TV, Jack believes that everything he sees on the screen is make-believe: as far as he’s concerned, Room is the entire world. He’s happy enough with his lot, however, because he doesn’t know any different; Ma keeps him entertained, and he has her undivided attention. Their days have a structure, with time to sleep, a time to eat, to play, to watch TV – even a time for lessons. (And at night, which is when ‘Old Nick’ sometimes visits, Ma keeps Jack hidden away.)
But now Jack is five, and Ma tries to explain to him that – contrary to everything she’s told him previously – there is a world beyond Room. Jack finds the concept impossible to grasp, but when Old Nick cuts the power supply to Room, Ma realizes their situation is even more precarious than she had previously thought. She decides they have to act, and comes up with a plan: she will tell Old Nick that Jack is dead and persuade him to dispose of the body. At an appropriate moment, Jack – still very much alive – will make a run for it.
Ma and Jack spend ages rehearsing exactly what Jack has to do, and – miraculously – their plan works: Jack manages to get out of Room, and away from Old Nick. He manages, too, to convince a bystander to alert the police, who subsequently rescue Ma.
For Jack, however, freedom is an alien concept, and he’s suddenly catapulted into a world that’s both unfamiliar and terrifying; for him, it’s escape, not being held captive, that is frightening. For Ma, too, life on the outside requires many adjustments; not least, the two have to learn how to live together in a world full of other people.
‘He should have seen it coming. His life had been one mishap after another. So he should have been prepared for this one…’
Julian Treslove, a professionally unspectacular former BBC radio producer, and Sam Finkler, a popular Jewish philosopher, writer and television personality, are old school friends. Despite a prickly relationship and very different lives, they’ve never quite lost touch with each other – or with their former teacher, Libor Sevick, a Czech always more concerned with the wider world than with exam results.
Now, both Libor and Sam are recently widowed, and with Treslove, his chequered and unsuccessful record with women rendering him an honorary third widower, they dine at Libor’s grand, central London apartment.
It’s a sweetly painful evening of reminiscence in which all three remove themselves to a time before they had loved and lost; a time before they had fathered children, before the devastation of separations, before they had prized anything greatly enough to fear the loss of it. Better, perhaps, to go through life without knowing happiness at all because that way you have less to mourn? Treslove finds he has tears enough for the unbearable sadness of both his friends’ losses.
And it’s that very evening, at exactly 11:30, as Treslove, walking home, hesitates a moment outside the window of the oldest violin dealer in the country, that he is attacked. And after this, his whole sense of who and what he is will slowly and ineluctably change.
The Finkler Question is a scorching story of friendship and loss, exclusion and belonging, and of the wisdom and humanity of maturity. Funny, furious, unflinching, this extraordinary novel shows one of our finest writers at his brilliant best.
When my countrymen imagined America, they thought of savages and bears and presidents who would not wear wigs. Who among them could have conjured Miss Godefroy in all her beauty of form and elegance of mind, her wit, her delicacy, her slender ankles amid those mad red leaves?
An exploration of the great adventure of American democracy, it thrillingly brings to life two characters who, born on different sides of history, come together to share an extraordinary relationship. Olivier is a French aristocrat, sent to the New World ostensibly to study its prisons, but in reality to save his neck in a future revolution. Parrot is the son of an itinerant English printer, sent to spy and protect him. With the narrative shifting between the perspectives of master and servant, we see the adventure of American democracy, in theory and in practice, told with Carey’s dazzling wit and inventiveness.
The Long Song is Andrea Levy’s first novel in six years, following the critically acclaimed and award-winning Small Island.
Told by July, a slave girl born on a Jamaican sugar plantation in the nineteenth century, this is the story of her life during and after the last years of slavery:
‘You do not know me yet. My son Thomas, who is publishing this book, tells me it is customary at this place in a novel to give the reader a little taste of the story that is held within these pages. As your storyteller, I am to convey that this tale is set in Jamaica during the last turbulent years of slavery and the early years of freedom that followed.’
There is a moment when any real journey begins. Sometimes it happens as you leave your house, sometimes it’s a long way from home…
A young man makes three journeys that take him through Greece, India and Africa. He travels lightly, simply. To those who travel with him and those whom he meets on the way – including a handsome, enigmatic stranger, a group of careless backpackers and a woman on the edge – he is the Follower, the Lover and the Guardian. Yet, despite the man’s best intentions, each journey ends in disaster. Together, these three journeys will change his life.
A novel of longing and thwarted desire, rage and compassion, In a Strange Room is the hauntingly beautiful evocation of one man’s search for love and for a place to call home.
September 9th, 2010 § 0 comments § permalink
When my countrymen imagined America, they thought of savages and bears and presidents who would not wear wigs. Who among them could have conjured Miss Godefroy in all her beauty of form and elegance of mind, her wit, her delicacy, her slender ankles amid those mad red leaves?
An exploration of the great adventure of American democracy, it thrillingly brings to life two characters who, born on different sides of history, come together to share an extraordinary relationship. Olivier is a French aristocrat, sent to the New World ostensibly to study its prisons, but in reality to save his neck in a future revolution. Parrot is the son of an itinerant English printer, sent to spy and protect him. With the narrative shifting between the perspectives of master and servant, we see the adventure of American democracy, in theory and in practice, told with Carey’s dazzling wit and inventiveness.
Jack is five. He lives in a single room with his Ma. The room is locked. Neither Jack nor Ma have a key.
The novel opens as Jack turns five. Jack has never been outside of Room, as he calls it, and although he and Ma have access to a TV, Jack believes that everything he sees on the screen is make-believe: as far as he’s concerned, Room is the entire world. He’s happy enough with his lot, however, because he doesn’t know any different; Ma keeps him entertained, and he has her undivided attention. Their days have a structure, with time to sleep, a time to eat, to play, to watch TV – even a time for lessons. (And at night, which is when ‘Old Nick’ sometimes visits, Ma keeps Jack hidden away.)
But now Jack is five, and Ma tries to explain to him that – contrary to everything she’s told him previously – there is a world beyond Room. Jack finds the concept impossible to grasp, but when Old Nick cuts the power supply to Room, Ma realizes their situation is even more precarious than she had previously thought. She decides they have to act, and comes up with a plan: she will tell Old Nick that Jack is dead and persuade him to dispose of the body. At an appropriate moment, Jack – still very much alive – will make a run for it.
Ma and Jack spend ages rehearsing exactly what Jack has to do, and – miraculously – their plan works: Jack manages to get out of Room, and away from Old Nick. He manages, too, to convince a bystander to alert the police, who subsequently rescue Ma.
For Jack, however, freedom is an alien concept, and he’s suddenly catapulted into a world that’s both unfamiliar and terrifying; for him, it’s escape, not being held captive, that is frightening. For Ma, too, life on the outside requires many adjustments; not least, the two have to learn how to live together in a world full of other people.
Leningrad in 1952: a city recovering from war, where Andrei, a young hospital doctor and Anna, a nursery school teacher, are forging a life together. Summers at the dacha, preparations for the hospital ball, work and the care of sixteen year old Kolya fill their minds. They try hard to avoid coming to the attention of the authorities, but even so their private happiness is precarious. Stalin is still in power, and the Ministry for State Security has new targets in its sights. When Andrei has to treat the seriously ill child of a senior secret police officer, Volkov, he finds himself and his family caught in an impossible game of life and death – for in a land ruled by whispers and watchfulness, betrayal can come from those closest to you.
There is a moment when any real journey begins. Sometimes it happens as you leave your house, sometimes it’s a long way from home…
A young man makes three journeys that take him through Greece, India and Africa. He travels lightly, simply. To those who travel with him and those whom he meets on the way – including a handsome, enigmatic stranger, a group of careless backpackers and a woman on the edge – he is the Follower, the Lover and the Guardian. Yet, despite the man’s best intentions, each journey ends in disaster. Together, these three journeys will change his life.
A novel of longing and thwarted desire, rage and compassion, In a Strange Room is the hauntingly beautiful evocation of one man’s search for love and for a place to call home.
‘He should have seen it coming. His life had been one mishap after another. So he should have been prepared for this one…’
Julian Treslove, a professionally unspectacular former BBC radio producer, and Sam Finkler, a popular Jewish philosopher, writer and television personality, are old school friends. Despite a prickly relationship and very different lives, they’ve never quite lost touch with each other – or with their former teacher, Libor Sevick, a Czech always more concerned with the wider world than with exam results.
Now, both Libor and Sam are recently widowed, and with Treslove, his chequered and unsuccessful record with women rendering him an honorary third widower, they dine at Libor’s grand, central London apartment.
It’s a sweetly painful evening of reminiscence in which all three remove themselves to a time before they had loved and lost; a time before they had fathered children, before the devastation of separations, before they had prized anything greatly enough to fear the loss of it. Better, perhaps, to go through life without knowing happiness at all because that way you have less to mourn? Treslove finds he has tears enough for the unbearable sadness of both his friends’ losses.
And it’s that very evening, at exactly 11:30, as Treslove, walking home, hesitates a moment outside the window of the oldest violin dealer in the country, that he is attacked. And after this, his whole sense of who and what he is will slowly and ineluctably change.
The Finkler Question is a scorching story of friendship and loss, exclusion and belonging, and of the wisdom and humanity of maturity. Funny, furious, unflinching, this extraordinary novel shows one of our finest writers at his brilliant best.
The Long Song is Andrea Levy’s first novel in six years, following the critically acclaimed and award-winning Small Island.
Told by July, a slave girl born on a Jamaican sugar plantation in the nineteenth century, this is the story of her life during and after the last years of slavery:
‘You do not know me yet. My son Thomas, who is publishing this book, tells me it is customary at this place in a novel to give the reader a little taste of the story that is held within these pages. As your storyteller, I am to convey that this tale is set in Jamaica during the last turbulent years of slavery and the early years of freedom that followed.’
C follows the short, intense life of Serge Carrefax, a man who – as his name suggests – surges into the electric modernity of the early twentieth century, transfixed by the technologies that will obliterate him.
Born to the sound of one of the very earliest experimental wireless stations, Serge finds himself steeped in a weird world of transmissions, whose very air seems filled with cryptic and poetic signals of all kinds. When personal loss strikes him in his adolescence, this world takes on a darker and more morbid aspect. What follows is a stunning tour de force in which the eerily idyllic settings of pre-war Europe give way to the exhilarating flightpaths of the frontline aeroplane radio operator, then the prison camps of Germany, the drug-fuelled London of the roaring twenties and, finally, the ancient tombs of Egypt.
Reminiscent of Bolaño, Beckett and Pynchon, this is a remarkable novel – a compelling, sophisticated and sublimely imaginative book uncovering the hidden codes and dark rhythms that sustain life.
Japan, 1799; Jacob de Zoet arrives on Dejima in Nagasaki harbour. For over 150 years this artificial island, manned by the Dutch East India Company, has been the only point of contact between Japan and Europe. The foreign traders are forbidden to leave the island whilst the Japanese may not travel beyond their native land. Yet through the porthole of Dejima the new learning of the Enlightenment seeps into the Shogun’s cloistered realm while tales of a mysterious land seep out.
As a junior clerk, de Zoet’s task is to uncover evidence of the previous Chief Resident’s malpractice. Ostracised by his compatriots, he befriends a local interpreter and becomes drawn to one of the few women on the island, a midwife with a scarred face who is granted permission to study under the Company physician. But in the battles for supremacy on Dejima and the mainland, and between the Dutch and British on the high seas, trust is betrayed and loyalties are tested to breaking point.
At once a love story, an adventure, a study of power and corruption, and a glimpse into a hidden world, The Thousand Autumns of Jacob de Zoet brings to vivid life the ordinary – and extraordinary – people caught up in a tectonic shift between East and West. It is an historical novel unlike any other from one of the brightest talents writing in the English language.
In 1982, the oil rig Ocean Ranger sank off the coast of Newfoundland during a Valentine’s night storm. In the early hours of the next morning, all 84 men aboard died.
Helen O’Mara is one of those left behind when her husband, Cal, drowns. Her story starts years after the Ranger disaster, but she is compelled to travel back to the ‘February’ that persists in her mind, and to that moment in 1982 when, expecting a fourth child, she received the call informing her that Cal was lost at sea.
A quarter of a century on, late one winter’s night, Helen is woken by another phone call. It is her wayward son John, in another time zone, on his way home. He has made a girl pregnant and he wants Helen to decide what he should do. As John grapples with what it might mean to be a father, Helen realises that she must shake off her decades of mourning in order to help.
With grace and precision, and a shocking ability to render the precise details of her characters’ physical and emotional worlds, Lisa Moore reveals the whole story to us. And just as, finally, we watch the oil rig go down, we see Helen emerging from her grief to greet a new life.
Ruprecht Van Doren is an overweight genius whose hobbies include very difficult maths and the Search for Extra-Terrestrial Intelligence. Daniel ‘Skippy’ Juster is his roommate. In the grand old Dublin institution that is Seabrook College for Boys, nobody pays either of them much attention. But when Skippy falls for Lori, the Frisbee-playing Siren from the girls’ school next door, suddenly all kinds of people take an interest – including Carl, part-time drug-dealer and official school psychopath…
A tragic comedy of epic sweep and dimension, Skippy Dies wrings every last drop of humour and hopelessness out of life, love, mermaids, M-theory, the poetry of Robert Graves, and all the mysteries of the human heart.
In a silent valley stands an isolated stone farmhouse, the Mas Lunel. Its owner is Aramon Lunel, an alcoholic so haunted by his violent past that he’s become incapable of all meaningful action, letting his hunting dogs starve and his land go to ruin. Meanwhile, his sister, Audrun, alone in her modern bungalow within sight of the Mas Lunel, dreams of exacting retribution for the unspoken betrayals that have blighted her life.
Into this closed Cévenol world comes Anthony Verey, a wealthy but disillusioned antiques dealer from London. Now in his sixties, Anthony hopes to remake his life in France, and he begins looking at properties in the region. From the moment he arrives at the Mas Lunel, a frightening and unstoppable series of consequences is set in motion.
Two worlds and two cultures collide. Ancient boundaries are crossed, taboos are broken, a violent crime is committed. And all the time the Cévennes hills remain, as cruel and seductive as ever, unforgettably captured in this powerful and unsettling novel, which reveals yet another dimension to Rose Tremain’s extraordinary imagination.
At a suburban barbecue one afternoon, a man slaps an unruly three-year-old boy. The boy is not his son. It is a single act of violence, but the slap reverberates through the lives of everyone who witnesses it.
Christos Tsiolkas presents the impact of this apparently minor domestic incident through the eyes of eight characters. The result is an unflinching interrogation of the modern family, a deeply thought-provoking novel of boundaries and their limits…
The Sopranos are back: out of school and out in the world, gathered in Gatwick to plan a super-cheap last-minute holiday to celebrate their reunion. Kay, Kylah, Manda, Rachel and Finn are joined by Finn’s equally gorgeous friend Ava – a half-French philosophy student – and are ready to go on the rampage.
Just into their twenties and as wild as ever, they’ve added acrylic nails, pedicures, mobile phones and credit cards to their arsenal, but are still the same thirsty girls: their holiday bags packed with skimpy clothes and condoms, their hormones rampant. Will it be Benidorm or Magaluf, Paris or Las Vegas? One thing is certain: a great deal of fast-food will be eaten and gallons of Guinness will be drunk by the alpha-female Manda, and she will be matched by the others’ enthusiastic intake of Bacardi Breezers, vodkas and Red Bull.
With Alan Warner’s pitch-perfect ear for dialogue, pinpoint characterisation and glorious set-pieces, this is a novel propelled by conversation through scenes of excess and debauchery, hilarity and sadness. Like the six young women at its centre, The Stars in the Bright Sky is vivid and brimming with life – in all its squalor, rage, tears and laughter – and presents an unforgettable story of female friendship.
May 24th, 2010 § Comments Off § permalink
The Orange Prize for Fiction (known as the Orange Broadband Prize for Fiction from 2007 to 2008) is one of the United Kingdom’s most prestigious literary prizes, annually awarded to a female author of any nationality for the best original full-length novel written in English, and published in the United Kingdom in the preceding year. The prize was originally due to be launched in 1994 with the support of Mitsubishi but public controversy over the merits of the award caused the sponsorship to be withdrawn. Funding from Orange, a UK mobile network operator and Internet service provider, allowed the prize to be launched in 1996 by a committee of male and female “journalists, reviewers, agents, publishers, librarians, booksellers”, including current Honorary Director Kate Mosse. The prize was established to recognise the contributions of female writers who Mosse believed were often overlooked in other major literary awards, and in reaction to the all-male shortlist for the 1991 Man Booker Prize. The winner of the prize receives £30,000, along with a bronze sculpture called the Bessie created by artist Grizel Niven, the sister of actor and writer David Niven. Typically, a longlist of nominees is announced around March each year, followed by a shortlist in June; within days the winner is announced. The winner is selected by a board of “five leading women” each year. In 2005, judges named Andrea Levy’s Small Island as the “Orange of Oranges”, the best novel of the preceding decade.
The BBC suggests that the Orange Prize forms part of the “trinity” of UK literary prizes, along with the Man Booker Prize and the Costa Book Awards; the sales of works by the nominees of these awards are significantly boosted. Levy’s 2004 winning book sold almost one million copies (in comparison to less than 600,000 for the Man Booker Prize winner of the same year), while sales of Helen Dunmore’s A Spell of Winter quadrupled after being awarded the inaugural prize. Valerie Martin’s 2003 award saw her novel sales increase tenfold after the award, and British libraries, who often support the prize with various promotions, reported success in introducing people to new authors: “48% said that they had tried new writers as a result of the promotion, and 42% said that they would try other books by the new authors they had read.” However, the fact that the prize singles out female writers is not without controversy. After the prize’s foundation, Auberon Waugh nicknamed it the “Lemon Prize” while Germaine Greer claimed there would soon be a prize for “writers with red hair”. Winner of the 1990 Man Booker Prize A. S. Byatt has called it a “sexist prize”, claiming “such a prize was never needed.” In 1999, the chairwoman of the judges, Lola Young, claimed that British female literature fell into two categories, either “insular and parochial” or “domestic in a piddling kind of way”. Linda Grant suffered accusations of plagiarism following her award in 2000, while the following year, a panel of male critics produced their own shortlist and heavily criticised the genuine shortlist. The 2007 shortlist was decried for being derived from “… a lot of dross …” by the chair of the judging panel Muriel Gray, while former editor of The Times Simon Jenkins called it “sexist”. In 2008, writer Tim Lott called the award “a sexist con-trick” and suggested “the Orange Prize is sexist and discriminatory, and it should be shunned”.
No woman has won the award more than once but Margaret Atwood has been nominated three times without a win. Since the inaugural award to Helen Dunmore, British writers have won five times, while North American authors have secured the prize seven times.
The judges for The Orange Prize for Fiction 2010 comprised rabbi and author Baroness Neuberger, author Michèle Roberts, journalist Miranda Sawyer and editor of British Vogue Alexandra Shulman.
The winner of the £30,000 prize will be announced on 9th June.
The shortlist for The Orange Prize for Fiction 2010:
The Very Thought of You
England, 31st August 1939: the world is on the brink of war. As Hitler prepares to invade Poland, thousands of children are evacuated from London to escape the impending Blitz. Torn from her mother, eight-year-old Anna Sands is relocated with other children to a large Yorkshire estate that has been opened up to evacuees by Thomas and Elizabeth Ashton, an enigmatic childless couple. Soon Anna gets drawn into their unravelling relationship, seeing things that are not meant for her eyes – and finding herself part-witness and part-accomplice to a love affair, with unforeseen consequences.
The Lacuna
Born in the US and reared in a series of provincial households in Mexico, Harrison Shepherd is mostly a liability to his social-climbing mother, Salomé; his fortunes remaining insecure as Salomé finds her rich men-friends always on the losing side of the Mexican Revolution.
Harrison aims for invisibility, observing his world and recording everything in his notebooks with a peculiar selfless irony. Life is what he learns from servants putting him to work in the kitchen, errands he runs on the streets. Then, one day, he ends up mixing plaster for famed Mexican muralist, Diego Riviera – which leads to a job in Riviera’s house, where Harrison makes himself useful to the muralist, his wife Frida Kahlo and the exiled Bolshevik leader, Lev Trotsky.
A violent upheaval sends him to the US. In Carolina, he remakes himself in America’s hopeful image and finds an extraordinary use for his talents of observation. But political winds continue to volley him between north and south, in a story that turns many times on the unspeakable breach – the lacuna – between truth and public presumption.
Black Water Rising
On a dark night, out on the Houston bayou to celebrate his wife’s birthday, Jay Porter hears a scream. Saving a distressed woman from drowning, he opens a Pandora’s Box.
Not the lawyer he set out to be, Jay long ago made peace with his radical youth, tucked away his darker sins and resolved to make a fresh start. His impulsive act out on the bayou is heroic, but it puts Jay in danger, ensnaring him in a murder investigation that could cost him his practice, his family and even his life. But before he can untangle the mystery that stretches to the highest reaches of corporate power, he must confront the demons of his past.
Wolf Hall
England in the 1540s is a heartbeat from disaster. If the king dies without a male heir, the country could be destroyed by civil war. Henry VIII wants to annul his marriage of twenty years, and marry Anne Boleyn. The pope and most of Europe oppose him. The quest for the petulant king’s freedom destroys his advisor, the brilliant Cardinal Wolsey, and leaves a power vacuum and a deadlock.
Into this impasse steps Thomas Cromwell. Son of a brutal blacksmith, a political genius, a briber, a bully and a charmer, Cromwell has broken all the rules of a rigid society in his rise to power, and is prepared to break some more. Rising from the ashes of personal disaster – the loss of his young family and of Wolsey, his beloved patron – he picks his way deftly through a court where ‘man is wolf to man.’ Pitting himself against parliament, the political establishment and the papacy, he is prepared to reshape England to his own and Henry’s desires.
A Gate at the Stairs
With her government quietly gearing up for war in the Middle East, twenty-year-old Tassie Keltjin, a ‘half-Jewish’ farmer’s daughter from the plains of the Midwest, has come to the university town of Troy – a girl escaping her home to encounter the complex world of culture and politics.
When she takes a job as a part-time nanny to a couple who seem at once mysterious and glamorous, Tassie is drawn more deeply into the life of their newly-adopted child and a household that steadily reveals its complications. With her past becoming increasingly alien to her – her parents seem older when she visits; her disillusioned brother ever more fixed on joining the military – Tassie finds herself becoming the stranger she has at times imagined herself to be. As the year unfolds, love leads her to new and formative experiences, but it is then that the past and the future burst forth in dramatic and shocking ways.
The White Woman on a Green Bicycle
When George and Sabine Harwood arrive in Trinidad from England George instantly takes to their new life, but Sabine feels isolated, heat-fatigued, and ill at ease with the racial segregation and the imminent dawning of a new era. Her only solace is her growing fixation with Eric Williams, the charismatic leader of Trinidad’s new national party, to whom she pours out all her hopes and fears for the future in letters that she never brings herself to send. As the years progress, George and Sabine’s marriage endures for better or worse. When George discovers Sabine’s cache of letters, he realises just how many secrets she’s kept from him – and he from her – over the decades. And he is seized by an urgent, desperate need to prove his love for her, with tragic consequences…
The Award was launched in 2005 in partnership with Arts Council England. Renewing their commitment to the partnership with Orange, Arts Council England has committed a further £30,000 over the next three years (£10,000 per year) for bursary awards for the winners of the Orange Award for New Writers. By offering a bursary to a novelist or short story writer for her first publication, the Arts Council is able to support the professional development of a writer at a crucial stage in her career.
Authors who have written their first work of fiction can be entered for both the Orange Prize for Fiction and the Award for New Writers.
The shortlist for The Orange Award for New Writers 2010:
The Book of Fires
1752. As winter approaches, two guilty secrets drive seventeen-year-old Agnes Trussel to run away from her home in rural Sussex. Pregnant with an unwanted child and carrying stolen coins, she is shocked by the squalor and poverty of London.
May 20th, 2010 § 0 comments § permalink
Tinkers by Paul Harding
An old man lies dying. Confined to bed in his living room, he sees the walls around him begin to collapse, the windows come loose from their sashes, and the ceiling plaster fall off in great chunks, showering him with a lifetime of debris: newspaper clippings, old photographs, wool jackets, rusty tools, and the mangled brass works of antique clocks. Soon, the clouds from the sky above plummet down on top of him, followed by the stars, till the black night covers him like a shroud. He is hallucinating, in death throes from cancer and kidney failure.
A methodical repairer of clocks, he is now finally released from the usual constraints of time and memory to rejoin his father, an epileptic, itinerant peddler, whom he had lost 7 decades before. In his return to the wonder and pain of his impoverished childhood in the backwoods of Maine, he recovers a natural world that is at once indifferent to man and inseparable from him, menacing and awe inspiring.
Tinkers is about the legacy of consciousness and the porousness of identity from one generation to the next. At once heartbreaking and life affirming, it is an elegiac meditation on love, loss, and the fierce beauty of nature.
Paul Harding (born 1967) is an American musician and author, best known for his debut novel Tinkers (2009) which won the 2010 Pulitzer Prize for Fiction. Harding was drummer for the band Cold Water Flat from approximately the founding in 1990 to 1997. Harding has a B.A. in English from the University of Massachusetts, Amherst and an MFA from the Iowa Writers’ Workshop and has taught writing at Harvard University and the University of Iowa.
Harding grew up on the north shore of Boston in the town of Wenham, Massachusetts. As a youth he spent a lot of time “knocking about in the woods” which he attributes to his love of nature. His grandfather fixed clocks and he apprenticed under him, an experience that found its way into his novel Tinkers. After graduating from UMass, he spent time touring with his band Cold Water Flat in the US and Europe. He had always been a heavy reader and while in the middle of reading Carlos Fuentes’ Terra Nostra he remembered putting it down and thinking “this is what I want to do”. In that book Harding saw the entire world, all of history. When he next had time off from touring with the band he signed up for a summer writing class at Skidmore College in New York. By pure chance his teacher was Marilynne Robinson and through her he learned about the Iowa Writers’ Workshop writing program and applied and was accepted. There he studied with Barry Unsworth, Elizabeth McCracken and later Marilynne Robinson. At some point he realized some of the people he admired most were “profoundly religious” and so he spent years reading theology, and was “deeply” influenced by Karl Barth and John Calvin. He considers himself a “self-taught modern New England transcendentalist”.
Musically, he admires jazz drummers and considers Coltrane’s drummer, Elvin Jones, the greatest.
Harding lives near Boston with his wife and two sons.
May 15th, 2010 § 3 comments § permalink
The Munster Literature Centre is pleased to release the longlist for the 2010 Cork City – Frank O’Connor Short Story Award, now in its sixth year. The longlist is almost evenly split between women and men this year with 28 men and 26 women. The strength of the short story in the United States is reflected by that country’s overwhelming number of 21 longlistees. This year is also noted for a surge of entries from Asia, accounting for one fifth of all titles. There are three Irish nominees this year including Nuala Ni Chonchuir, the first author to be longlisted for the third time.
Household names in the running include novelist Louis De Bernieres, playwright and film star Sam Shepherd, T.C. Boyle, Michelle Roberts and short story specialist Helen Simpson.
The jury for this year consists of Irish novelist Mary Morrissey, Nadine O’Regan who is arts editor for the Sunday Business Post and Diana Reich, former Orange Fiction Prize judge and a curator of the Small Wonder short story festival in the south of England.
The Cork City – Frank O’Connor Short Story Award is the world’s richest and most prestigious prize for the form and is sponsored by Cork City Council. It is awarded to the best new collection of the year. Previous winners have included Haruki Murakami (Japan), Jhumpa Lahiri (USA) and Simon Van Booy (UK). On two occasions the award has gone to an author for their first book: Yiyun Li (China) in 2005 and Miranda July (USA) in 2007.
A shortlist of six will be announced at the beginning of July. The winner will be chosen in September and receive the award at the close of the world’s oldest annual short story festival in Cork.
1. Laburnum by Temsula Ao (India) Penguin
2. Something is out there: Stories by Richard Bausch by Richard Bausch (USA) Alfred A. Knopf
3. Memoirs of a Gone World by Martin Bax (UK) Salt
4. Miracle Boy and Other Stories by Pinckney Benedict (USA) Press 53
5. Notwithstanding by Louis de Bernières (UK) Harvill Secker
6. Mattaponi Queen: stories by Belle Boggs (USA) Graywolf Press
7. Wild Child by T.C. Boyle (USA) Bloomsbury
8. Never Been Better by O Thiam Chin (Singapore) MPH Publishing
9. Tales in Colour and Other Stories by Kunzang Choden (Bhutan) Zubaan – Penguin
10. A Man Melting by Craig Cliff (New Zealand) Vintage – Random House
11. The Washer of the Dead by Venita Coelho (India) Zubaan – Penguin
12. Nude by Nuala Ní Chonchúir (Ireland) Salt
13. The Shielding by David Constantine (UK) Literature North West
14. The Haunted Heart and Other Tales by Jameson Currier (USA) Lethe Press
15. Ronald Reagan, My Father by Brian Joseph Davies (Canada) ECW Press
16. Circus Bulgaria by Deyan Enev (Bulgaria) Portobello Books
17. Call The Ahab by Anne Finger (USA) University of Nebraska Press
18. Gentleman’s Relish by Patrick Gale (UK) Fourth Estate
19. The Unspoken Truth by Angelica Garnett (UK) Chatto and Windus – Random House
20. Girl Trouble by Holly Goddard Jones (USA) Harper Perennial
21. Dangerous Places by Perry Glasser (USA) BkMk Press
22. Ghosts of Wyoming by Alyson Hagy (USA) Graywolf Press
23. Luck by Dhruba Hazarika (India) Penguin
24. Tender by Mark Illis (UK) Salt
25. More of This World or Maybe Another by Barb Johnson (USA) Harper Perennial
26. Homicide Survivors Picnic and Other Stories by Lorraine M. López (USA) BkMk Press
27. Apparition and Late Fictions: a novella and stories by Thomas Lynch (USA) Jonathan Cape – Random House
28. Twelve Stories by Paul Magrs (UK) Salt
29. The Mango War: and other stories by Martin Malone (Ireland) New Island
30. Living as a Moon by Owen Marshall (New Zealand) Vintage – Random House
31. An Allergic Reaction to National Anthems by Donal McLaughlin (Northern Ireland) Argyll Publishing
32. The Bigness of the world by Lori Ostlund (USA) University of Georgia Press
33. The Bone Garden and Other Stories by Manoj Kumar Panda (India) Rupantar
34. The Proper Care of Foxes by Wena Poon (Singapore) Ethos Books
35. Further Adventures in the Restless Universe by Dawn Raffel (USA) Dzanc Books
36. Killing the Water by Mahmud Rahman (Bangladesh) Penguin
37. Burning Bright by Ron Rash (USA) Ecco; Harper Collins
38. The Price Of Love: And Other Stories by Peter Robinson (UK) McClelland and Stewart
39. Triple Time by Anne Sanow (USA) Pittsburgh University Press
40. This Cake Is for the Party by Sarah Selecky (Canada) Thomas Allen Publishers
41. Eating Women, Telling Tales: Stories about Food by Bubul Sharma (India) Zubaan – Penguin
42. Love songs for the shy and cynical by Robert Shearman (UK) Big Finish
43. Day out of Days by Sam Sheppard (USA) Alfred A. Knopf
44. Anatolia and Other Stories by Anis Shivani (USA) Black Lawrence Press
45. Chattering: Stories by Louise Stern (USA) Granta
46. Venus Crossing by Kalpana Swaminathan (India) Penguin
47. Everything here is the best thing ever by Justin Taylor (USA) Harper Perennial
48. Super Girl by Ruth Thomas (UK) Faber and Faber
49. What the world will look like when all the water leaves us by Laura van den Berg (USA) Dzanc Books
50. Chinese Stories in Times of Change by David T. K. Wong (China) Asian Stories – Muse
51. How To Escape From A Leper Colony by Tiphanie Yanique (US Virgin Islands) Graywolf Press
52. Mud: Stories of Sex and Love by Michele Roberts (UK) Little Brown
53. In-Flight Entertainment by Helen Simpson (UK) Cape
54. Greedy Little Eyes by Billie Livingston (Canada) Random House Canada
(Source: The Munster Literature Centre)
May 14th, 2010 § 0 comments § permalink
The Bollinger Everyman Wodehouse Prize is the UK’s only literary award for comic writing. Established in 2000 and named in honour of P G Wodehouse, past winners include Paul Torday in 2007 with Salmon Fishing in the Yemen and Marina Lewycka with A Short History of Tractors in Ukrainian 2005 and Jasper Fforde for The Well of Lost Plots in 2004.
The winner is announced at the annual Hay Festival in May and is presented with Champagne and 52 volumes of the Everyman Wodehouse edition. In addition, a Gloucester Old Spot pig is also named after the winning novel.
Ian McEwan’s first comedy, Solar (Jonathan Cape), is on the shortlist for this year’s Bollinger Everyman Wodehouse Prize for Comic Fiction.
Also on the shortlist are Skippy Dies by Paul Murray (Hamish Hamilton), Tiffany Murray’s Diamond Star Halo (Portobello), One Day by David Nicholls (Hodder & Stoughton) and Malcolm Pryce’s From Aberystwyth with Love (Bloomsbury).
The winner will be announced at the Hay festival at the end of May.
The literary event of the summer: a new novel from Ian McEwan, as surprising as it is masterful. Michael Beard is a Nobel prize–winning physicist whose best work is behind him. Trading on his reputation, he speaks for enormous fees, lends his name to the letterheads of renowned scientific institutions, and half-heartedly heads a government-backed initiative tackling global warming. While he coasts along in his professional life, Michael’s personal life is another matter entirely. His fifth marriage is crumbling under the weight of his infidelities. But this time the tables are turned: His wife is having an affair, and Michael realizes he is still in love with her. When Michael’s personal and professional lives begin to intersect in unexpected ways, an opportunity presents itself in the guise of an invitation to travel to New Mexico. Here is a chance for him to extricate himself from his marital problems, reinvigorate his career, and very possibly save the world from environmental disaster. Can a man who has made a mess of his life clean up the messes of humanity? A complex novel that brilliantly traces the arc of one man’s ambitions and self-deceptions, Solar is a startling, witty, and stylish new work from one of the world’s great writers.
Ruprecht Van Doren is an overweight genius whose hobbies include very difficult maths and the Search for Extra-Terrestrial Intelligence. Daniel ‘Skippy’ Juster is his roommate. In the grand old Dublin institution that is Seabrook College for Boys, nobody pays either of them much attention. But when Skippy falls for Lori, the Frisbee-playing Siren from the girls’ school next door, suddenly all kinds of people take an interest – including Carl, part-time drug-dealer and official school psychopath. While his teachers battle over modernisation, and Ruprecht attempts to open a portal into a parallel universe, Skippy, in the name of love, is heading for a showdown – in the form of a fatal doughnut-eating race that only one person will survive. This unlikely tragedy will explode Seabrook’s century-old complacency and bring all kinds of secrets into the light, until teachers and pupils alike discover that the fragile lines dividing past from present, love from betrayal – and even life from death – have become almost impossible to read…
Halo Llewelyn’s prayers begin, Dear God and Otis Redding, because she lives at Rockfarm, a rural recording studio where the sound of tractors and Stratocasters battle. One midsummer night an American band called Tequila arrives in a beautiful silver bus, and when they and that summer are gone, they leave behind an equally beautiful baby boy; they leave Fred. Fred is everybody’s favourite, a golden child, and Halo adores him. By seventeen his ambition has propelled him out into the word and into the stardom that was always his destiny. Yet up on stage, being screamed at by hundred of teenage girls and boys, Fred will always turn his spotlight on Halo in the crowd. That’s the problem with falling in love with your charismatic almost-brother: it can never be a secret. In the end, the whole world has to know. A seductive story of fate, magic, and rock ‘n’ roll, “Diamond Star Halo” shows what happens when a family and a farm become the breeding ground for fame.
‘I can imagine you at forty,’ she said, with malice in her voice. ‘I can picture it right now.’ He smiled without opening his eyes. ‘Go on then.’ 15th July 1988. Emma and Dexter meet for the first time on the night of their graduation. Tomorrow they must go their separate ways. So where will they be on this one day next year? And the year after that? And every year that follows? Twenty years, two people, One Day.
It is a sweltering August in Aberystwyth: the bandstand melts, the Pier droops, and Sospan the ice-cream seller experiments with some dangerously avant-garde new flavours. A man wearing a Soviet museum curator’s uniform walks into Louie Knight’s office and spins a wild and impossible tale of love, death, madness and betrayal. Sure, Louie had heard about Hughesovka, the legendary replica of Aberystwyth built in the Ukraine by some crazy nineteenth-century Czar. But he hadn’t believed that it really existed until he met Uncle Vanya. Now the old man’s story catapults him into the neon-drenched wilderness of Aberystwyth Prom in search of a girl who mysteriously disappeared thirty years ago. His life imperilled by snuff philatelists and a renegade spinning wheel salesman, Louie finds his fate depending on two most unlikely talismans – a ticket to Hughesovka and a Russian cosmonaut’s sock.
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