Booker Longlist Announced

The fall awards season kicked off today with the announcement of the longlist for the Booker Prize, 13 books long to be exact. As usual it's a mix of books that have already come out in the US, ones that are out in the UK but not the US, and ones that haven't come out anywhere yet:

• The White Tiger by Aravind Adiga
• Girl in a Blue Dress by Gaynor Arnold (out here and in the UK in November)
• The Secret Scripture by Sebastian Barry
• From A to X by John Berger
• The Lost Dog by Michelle de Kretser
• Sea of Poppies by Amitav Ghosh
• The Clothes on Their Backs by Linda Grant (available in Canada and the UK)
• A Case of Exploding Mangoes by Mohammed Hanif
• The Northern Clemency by Philip Hensher (UK edition; out in the US in February)
• Netherland by Joseph O'Neill
• The Enchantress of Florence by Salman Rushdie
• Child 44 by Tom Rob Smith
• A Fraction of the Whole by Steve Toltz

A couple of big names (Rushdie, fresh off defending his Best of the Bookers crown, as well as former prize-hating Booker winner John Berger), but on a list this long, the immediate story is who was left off and in this case that includes big and biggish names like Peter Carey, Tim Winton, James Kelman, and Zoe Heller. There's been a very active discussion board on the Booker site, with a lot of debate about possible nominees--often by people who have actually read the books!--but when they tallied their longlist predictions, they didn't fare so well, getting only Rushdie, Barry, Hanif, and Adiga right. Among those they were particularly excited about that didn't make it were Winton's Breath, Alexis Wright's Carpentaria, Andrew Crumey's Sputnik Caledonia, and Damon Galgut's The Impostor.

What will move on to the shortlist (announced September 9)? Netherland is probably the best-reviewed book of the year so far in the US (where it is set), but I don't think it's been quite as rapturously received in the UK, while my sense is that Rushdie's book was better reviewed in the UK (at least by John Sutherland, who doesn't have to eat his copy yet) than here. We've made both Enchantress of Florence and A Case of Exploding Mangoes Best of the Month picks so far this year. And most of the talk about the longlist will likely center on Child 44, a highly promoted and well-reviewed debut that is an unabashed thriller (see Richard K. Morgan on Omni earlier this month on genre fiction and the Booker). The one I'm most intrigued by is Toltz's A Fraction of the Whole, which has gotten comparisons to Dickens, Irving, David Foster Wallace, Marisha Pessl, and last year's finalist Nicola Barker for being both enormous and hilarious. --Tom