A Pain in the RSS

The shortlist for this year’s Man Booker Prize has been announced, with a field being described as the “youngest and most eclectic in years.” Many of the more experienced favourites (like Peter Carey, Andrew O’Hagan and David Mitchell) have all been overlooked for the £50,000 prize.

The shortlisted novels are:

The Inheritance of Loss by Kiran Desai (Hamish Hamilton)
The life of an embittered old judge in the north-eastern Himalayas is turned upside down by the arrival of his orphaned grand-daughter Sai. Their stories are woven together with the parallel narrative of the son of the judge’s cook, who lives in the shadowy world of illegal immigrants in New York.

Desai, 35, was born in India, the daughter of the author Anita Desai who has been shortlisted for the Booker Prize three times. Educated in India, England and the United States, she is a student on Columbia University’s creative writing course.

The Secret River by Kate Grenville (Canongate)
Thames waterman William Thornhill has a tough, but bearable, life until he makes a mistake for which he is made to pay dearly. He is sentenced to be transported to the colony of New South Wales, Australia, where he sets up home on 100 acres of land but is shocked to find aboriginal people are already living on part of it.

Kate Grenville, 55, was born in Sydney, Australia, and has worked as a film editor, journalist, typist and teacher. Her novels include The Idea of Perfection, which won the 2001 Orange Prize for fiction.

Carry Me Down by MJ Hyland (Canongate)
John Egan, a young boy, has the unusual talent of knowing when people are lying. He hopes that one day this gift will bring him fame, but in the meantime is forced to deal with the destructive undercurrents of his family. However, his obsession with uncovering the truth becomes a violent and frightening fixation.

MJ Hyland was born in London to Irish parents, spent her early childhood in Dublin before the family moved to Australia. After training and working as a lawyer, her first novel was published in 2004. She lives and works in Manchester.

In the Country of Men by Hisham Matar (Viking)
A young boy growing up in the Libyan capital, Tripoli, in 1979 witnesses a terrifying and bewildering world of secrets and lies. A mysterious man sits outside his house all day and asks questions, while his father has apparently disappeared.

This is the first novel by Hisham Matar, 35, who was born in New York, but spent his childhood in Libya and Egypt before moving to Britain in 1986 where he became an apprentice architect. Matar is the son of a Libyan dissident who has not been heard of since he was imprisoned in Tripoli in 1990.

Mother’s Milk by Edward St Aubyn (Picador)
The funny, if degenerate, exploits of Patrick Melrose, a man struggling to measure up to adulthood, and his aristocratic family. A follow-up to St Aubyn’s previous trilogy about the once-illustrious Melrose family, although can be read alone.

St Aubyn was born in 1960 in a part of Cornwall where his family had lived since the Norman Conquest. He was raped by his father as a child and further abused, became a heroin addict at 16 and continued the habit through Oxford University. At 28 he considered suicide but turned to therapy instead, talked through his life and used the material to become a writer.

The Night Watch by Sarah Waters (Virago)
The story of four Londoners – three women and a young man – and their interweaving stories during the Second World War. Kate is an ambulance driver, while Helen harbours a painful secret and Viv, a glamour girl, is stubbornly loyal to her brother Duncan, an apparent innocent.

Sarah Waters, 40, was born in Pembrokeshire and went to Cambridge University. Her first book, Tipping the Velvet, the Victorian lesbian novel, was adapted into a three-part television serial, its successor, Fingersmith, was shortlisted for the Booker and Orange prizes. It was also serialised on TV. Waters lives in London.

Via The Independant

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