Alert! The longlist for the 2016 Man Booker Prize has been announced, including JM Coetzee.
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It was not widely reviewed although it was described enthusiastically by the critic Jake Kerridge as “a real box of tricks … a truly ingenious thriller as confusingly multilayered as an Escher staircase”. This year the publisher is in the running for US-author Beatty’s The Sellout, a “biting satire” set in LA, that in the USA was named one of the best books of 2015 by the New York Times Book Review and Wall Street Journal.
Coetzee’s The Schooldays of Jesus has been named in the 2016 longlist alongside four authors with debut novels: David Means (Hystopia), Virginia Reeves (Work Like Any Other), Ottessa Moshfegh (Eileen) and Wyl Menmuir (The Many). The new book is a sequel to his 2013 novel The Childhood of Jesus and follows characters Simón and Inés as they resettle in Estrella after being forced to flee the city of Novilla and take in David, “the small boy who is always asking questions”. Her novel “Swimming Home” was shortlisted for the 2012 prize.
Jamaican author Marlon James won the prize previous year.
Ms Foreman said a “Brexit Britain” atmosphere had seeped into Cornwall author Wyl Menmuir’s debut novel The Many.
Boston-born Moshfegh is longlisted for her 1960s-set novel which tells the story of an unhappy young woman and a bitterly cold MA winter. Set in rural Alabama in the 1920s, it tells the story of a pioneering electricity engineer sent to prison for manslaughter after a young man stumbles on one of his illegal power lines.
AL Kennedy’s Serious Sweet is a drama set in a single-day about two damaged Londoners looking for hope which has been compared with James Joyce’s Ulysses.
South African-born J.M. Coetzee won both his Bookers before he relocated to Adelaide in 2002.
Vancouver-born, Montreal-based Madeleine Thien was recognized for “Do Not Say We Have Nothing” (Knopf Canada) and Montreal-born, Hungary-based David Szalay got the nod for “All That Man Is” (McClelland & Stewart).
Overlooked UK authors, who this year include Julian Barnes, Rose Tremain and Ian McEwan, should not complain about the rule change. United States authors are Beatty, Means, Moshfegh, Reeves and Strout.
The 13 novels will be whittled down to a shortlist before the prize is awarded at the London Guildhall in October.
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The victor will ultimately be named on 25th October, at a black-tie dinner at London’s Guildhall, as broadcast by the BBC.
