
The Booker Prize 2010 Shortlist includes:
Peter Carey – Parrot and Olivier in America (Faber and Faber) – Tales of American adventure
Emma Donoghue – Room (Picador – Pan Macmillan) – Ma and 5 year old Jack’s quest to escape from the clutches of Old Nick
Damon Galgut – In a Strange Room (Atlantic Books – Grove Atlantic) – Disastrous journeys
Howard Jacobson – The Finkler Question (Bloomsbury) – Friendship, trials and tribulations
Andrea Levy – The Long Song (Headline Review – Headline Publishing Group) – Slavery in the last days of slavery
Tom McCarthy – C (Jonathan Cape – Random House) – Technology, war and the 1920s
If Peter Carey is successful, he will become the first writer to have won the prize on three separate occasions, having already won with Oscar & Lucinda in 1988 and True History of the Kelly Gang in 2001.
J G Farell’s Troubles was unanimously voted the winner of the lost 1970 Man Booker Prize for Fiction with 38%. Although, The Siege of Krishnapur (1973), the second book from Trouble’s Empire trilogy, picked up the Man Booker Prize for Fiction in 1973, so I doubt J G Farrell holds too much of a grudge for the 40 year wait.


