The books gaining a place on the longlist of the Man Booker Prize for Fiction 2004 were announced on Thursday 26 August. Out of a grand total of 132 books, the five judges picked the following 22 titles:
Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie, Purple hibiscus (Fourth Estate) 320pp - 1st novel
Nadeem Aslam, Maps for lost lovers (Faber and Faber Ltd) 496pp - 2nd novel
Nicola Barker, Clear: a transparent novel (Fourth Estate) 352pp - 6th novel
John Bemrose, The Island Walkers (John Murray) 448pp - 1st novel
Ronan Bennett, Havoc, in its third year (Bloomsbury) 244pp - 4th novel
Susanna Clarke, Jonathan Strange & Mr Norrell (Bloomsbury) 800pp - 1st novel
Neil Cross, Always the sun (Scribner) 336pp - 5th novel
Achmat Dangor, Bitter fruit (Atlantic Books) 256pp - 1st novel in UK
Louise Dean, Becoming strangers (Scribner) 320pp - 1st novel
Lewis DeSoto, A blade of grass (The Maia Press Limited) 400pp - 1st novel
Sarah Hall, The electric Michelangelo (Faber and Faber Ltd) 288pp - 2nd novel
James Hamilton-Paterson, Cooking with Fernet Branca (Faber and Faber Ltd) 256pp - 5th novel
Justin Haythe, The honeymoon (Picador) 352pp - 1st novel
Shirley Hazzard, The great fire (Virago Press) 320pp - 4th novel
Alan Hollinghurst, The line of beauty (Picador) 320pp - 4th novel
Gail Jones, Sixty lights (The Harvill Press) 224pp - [?]3rd novel, 1st in UK
David Mitchell, Cloud atlas (Sceptre) 544pp - 3rd novel
Sam North, The unnumbered (Scribner) 400pp - 6th novel
Nicholas Shakespeare, Snowleg (The Harvill Press) 404pp - 4th novel
Matt Thorne, Cherry (Weidenfeld & Nicolson) 256pp - 6th novel
Colm Tóibín, The master (Picador) 200pp - 5th novel
Gerard Woodward, I’ll go to bed at noon (Chatto and Windus) 440pp - 2nd novel
Six of these titles will be picked for the shortlist, announced Tuesday 21 September. The 2004 winner from the shortlisted six will be announced at a BBC Two/BBC Four televised event on Tuesday 19 October. The winner receives £50,000, the five runners up £5,000 each, as well as their books gaining substantial extra sales. The current favourites to win are Alan Hollinghurst, David Mitchell or Colm Tóibín.
Two authors represent small independent publishers: Achmat Dangor and Lewis DeSoto. Two were Orange Prize for Fiction shortlisted: Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie and Shirley Hazzard. The ‘much hyped book trade sensation’ this year is by Susanna Clarke - not published here until 30 September - variously described as ‘a publishing phenomenon to rival Harry Potter’ and ‘a magical epic’.
This year’s judging panel is: Rt. Hon Chris Smith MP (Chair), Tibor Fischer novelist), Robert Macfarlane (writer and academic), Rowan Pelling (journalist and editor of The Erotic Review), and Fiammetta Rocco (literary editor of The Economist).
NB: since this was posted, Rowan Pelling has resigned the editorship of The Erotic Review following the title’s change of ownership from Dennis Publishing (publishers of Maxim and Viz) to Alton Russell International, responsible for producing adult magazine Penthouse UK (which I shall refrain from linking to here).
So far, comment about the longlist has concentrated on the high number of relatively unknown writers and, consequently, the lack of many expected well known names - Justin Cartwright, A L Kennedy, V S Naipaul, David Lodge and Andrea Levy (winner of this year’s Orange Prize for Fiction) to name a few. There has been the usual carping from the provinces, this year from Scotland with no authors represented, as seen in The (Glasgow) Herald.
One of the most prestigious literary prizes in the world, the Man Booker is eligible to books written in the last 12 months by writers in Commonwealth countries and the Republic of Ireland. However, some criticism has emerged around the rules of entry which allow no more than two submissions from each publisher plus books by any of the previous winning authors and books by any of the last ten years’ runners up. For example, this unprecedented article by one of the Booker judges, Tibor Fischer, in The Daily Telegraph. A week later another of the judges, Rowan Pelling, wrote this piece in The Guardian about the books she personally enjoyed reading.
The Man Booker website has made an effort for the first time and produced a surprisingly useful summary of the longlisted books - even with a ‘book picking’ tool. Other useful summaries of the longlist with brief synposes of each book have featured in The Guardian and The Independent. An excellent resource is a compilation of links to reviews of the longlisted books at ReviewsOfBooks.com Booker Prize section.
Last year’s winner was an Australian author D B C Pierre (real name Peter Finlay) for his first novel Vernon God Little.