J.M. Coetzee, Elizabeth Strout among Man Booker Prize contenders
J.M. Coetzee, Elizabeth Strout, Paul Beatty and Deborah Levy are among the contenders for this year's Man Booker Prize, one of the most prestigious literary awards for fiction in the world.
The chair of the judges panel, Amanda Foreman, praised the breadth of this year's selections: "Each novel provoked intense discussion and, at times, passionate debate, challenging our expectations of what a novel is and can be," she said.
"From the historical to the contemporary, the satirical to the polemical, the novels in this list come from both established writers and new voices. The writing is uniformly fresh, energetic and important. It is a longlist to be relished."
The shortlist of six finalists will be announced on September 13, with the winner named October 25. The top prize is £50,000.
This year's longlist of 13 books, chosen from 155 submissions, are:
From Great Britain:
A.L. Kennedy, "Serious Sweet" (Little A) covers 24 hours in the lives of two morally shaken Londoners whose connection becomes an unpredictable love story.
Deborah Levy, "Hot Milk" (Bloomsbury USA) examines a young woman whose efforts to help resolve her mother's mysterious illness lead to some unresolved emotional issues of her own. Levy was shortlisted for the Booker Prize in 2012 for "Swimming Home."
Graeme Macrae Burnet, "His Bloody Project" (Contraband) is a murder mystery set in the Scottish Highlands. Burnet's first book was "The Disappearance of Adèle Bedeau."
Ian McGuire, "The North Water" (Macmillan) is a thriller set aboard a nineteenth-century whaling ship in the Arctic Circle.
David Means' "Hystopia" (Macmillan) is a returning Vietnam War veteran's particularly skewed vision of history -- one in which JFK survived several assassination attempts and the government uses drugs to wipe the memories and traumas of soldiers. Means, who lives in Nyack, N.Y., is author of the short story collections "The Spot," "Assorted Fire Events," and "The Secret Goldfish." This is his first novel.
Wyl Menmuir, "The Many" (Salt), the unsettling tale of a newcomer who purchases a neglected house in an isolated fishing village, and finds intrigues among his new neighbors. This is Menmuir's debut novel.
From Canada:
David Szalay, "All That Man Is" (Graywolf Press) is a portrait of nine disparate characters in far-flung cities who collectively evoke twenty-first century man. Szalay, who lives in Budapest, is author of "London and the South-East," "The Innocent," and "Spring."
Madeleine Thien, "Do Not Say We Have Nothing" (Granta Books) recounts the revolutionary history of China through the family of a young woman who fled her home country following the crackdown at Tiananmen Square. Thien, the daughter of Malaysian-Chinese immigrants, is author of the novels "Certainty" and "Dogs at the Perimeter."
From South Africa:
Nobel Prize-winner J.M. Coetzee's "The Schooldays of Jesus" (Viking), a sequel to his 2013 "The Childhood of Jesus," cocerns a young boy growing up in a foreign land. Coetzee, now living in Australian, is the first person to have won the Booker Prize twice (for "Life and Times of Michael K." and "Disgrace").
From the United States:
Paul Beatty's comic novel "The Sellout" (Macmillan), winner of the 2015 National Book Critics Circle Award, features a disillusioned young Los Angeleno who brings back slavery. Beatty is also author of "Slumberland," "Tuff," and "The White Boy Shuffle."
Ottessa Moshfegh, "Eileen" (Penguin), in which a young secretary working at a boys' prison becomes complicit in a crime. Moshregh is author of the story collection "Homesick for Another World."
Virginia Reeves, "Work Like Any Other" (Simon & Schuster), about an Alabama farmer in the 1920s whose illegal siphoning of electricity sparks a descent for himself, his family and the family farm. This is Reeves' first novel.
Elizabeth Strout, "My Name Is Lucy Barton" (Penguin), about the relationship between a mother and daughter. Strout won a Pulitzer Prize for her novel "Olive Kitteridge," and is also author of "The Burgess Boys" and "Abide With Me."