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Man Booker Prize 2012 By Jess Rayner
F
or novelists the Man Booker Prize is big news in the literary calendar. So as the wait for the winner to be announced grows shorter here is a look at the novels in contention for the coveted prize. Last year’s prize put an emphasis on readability over critical merit
solely experimental novels that show the power and shocking nature of language. This year it is clear that the judges have steered clear of
Narcopolis By Jeet Thayil (Faber & Faber)
Set in the shadow of World War 2 in
Indian poet Jeet
Tan Twan Eng’s novel tells the story of young law graduate Yun Ling Teoh and her unlikely friendship
is made up of six very different Stothard as all showing “a huge and place in the renewing of our words and ideas”. Stothard stresses how when he and his fellow judges were making their decisions they
called the credibility of the award year’s shortlist turns its back on
The Garden of Evening Mists By Tan Twan Eng (Myrmidon)
on novels that push boundaries in this year’s shortlist makes for challenging yet dynamic reading has had. So here is your brief guide of what to expect from the 2012 contenders….
Narcopolis explores how opium dens in 1970s Mumbai leads to heroin addiction and a brutal modernity. Thayil has been quoted as saying he lost almost 20
prison camp seeks solace in the mountaintop garden of the title and enters into an apprenticeship with
uses his experience to create this vivid and honest portrayal. Judges verdict: ‘Poetry is not
unanswered questions surrounding them threaten to fracture their fragile friendship.
but we very much admired his perfumed prose from the drug dens and back streets of India’s most concentrated conurbation.’
Swimming Home By Deborah Levy (Faber & Faber)
Umbrella By Will Self (Bloomsbury)
the July heat wave Home explores the damage of depression on seemingly stable people. The novel is centred on a famous British poet on holiday with Kitty Finch. Kitty is obsessed with the poet and determined he should read a poem of her own. Levy’s Home is a dangerous yet emotive interrogation of obsession.
2012 Judges
Adam Brelsford puts the Lovecraft why…
the best known being Stuart Gordon’s Re-
and he’s had both the Penguin Modern Classics and Library
episode of the Ghostbusters cartoon (for all you
whose main message was that humans are a fairly
walking holiday in Germany. But he is haunted by mother’s abandonment of him when he was younger and adrift. Judges verdict: temperature control set very low and an acute sense of smell.’
The second in Mantel’s trilogy on
the lives of a misdiagnosed woman in a north London mental
Bring Up the Bodies begins in
an epidemic that raged across Europe after World War 1.
Lovecraftian anthologies
Futh a middleaged man trying to
Bring Up the Bodies By Hilary Mantel (Fourth Estate)
family and her doctor. The novel comprises of 400 pages without chapters and almost no paragraph breaks. This experimental narrative explores
obscurity.
Moore’s debut novel published by independent
This stream of consciousness
suggestion do the rest. He was also a bit of
H. P.
The Lighthouse By Alison Moore (Salt)
over a year. With Henry becoming increasingly left to Cromwell to disburden him his second wife. Judges verdict: ‘The judges this year noted her even greater mastery realism in the separation of past and present and the vivid depiction of English character and landscape.’
In the spotlight
to feature people discovering some unsavoury Cthulhu memes on the Internet some time. driven insane by it. Lovecraft’s style was a mixture of excess
and places. So forget the plush Cthulhu toys people like Stephen King (who called him ‘[t]he twentieth-century horror story’s dark
batrachian nightmares and maddeningly
also sometimes hold back at the moment of abominations and letting the power of
one of the greatest living writers of horror or
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