Man Booker prize shortlist 2008

The shortlist for this year's Man Booker Prize has now been announced, with two of my previous Books of the Week included. For my pre-announcement comments see below! The two favourites failed to make the shortlist, so the prize now seems very open. The Clothes on Their Backs will be the most difficult to find in the hardvcover first edition - the cheapest copies I can see at the moment (Ebay) are now £99 unsigned and £149 signed.

Aravind Adiga The White Tiger (Atlantic)

Sebastian Barry The Secret Scripture (Faber and Faber)

Amitav Ghosh Sea of Poppies (John Murray)

Linda Grant The Clothes on Their Backs (Virago)

Philip Hensher The Northern Clemency (Fourth Estate)

Steve Toltz A Fraction of the Whole (Hamish Hamilton)

My predictions:

The shortlist for this year's Man Booker prize will be announced tomorrow. There seems to be a concensus that this is a strong year for fiction, and there are a number of interesting candidates to choose from. The bookies currently favour Salman Rushdie and Joseph O'Neill, and there is a good chance that both will reach the shortlist. The Enchantress by Rushdie was published in two limited editions as well as the trade edition in the UK, with the 100 signed copy edition published in association with Blackwell's being the most desirable - you could still pick up a copy tonight at £100 if you are very quick on ABEbooks, which will be good value if the book is shortlisted.

Of the other novels, I previously chose The Secret Scripture and The White Tiger as Books of the Week, so I hope they do well. The one which will be most difficult for collectors if shortlisted will be Linda Grant's The Clothes on Their Backs, which was issued in a small hardback run at the same time as a paperback edition. The hardback is now very difficult to find at £30 - 50, with prices likely to rise significantly if it is shortlisted.

Book of the Week - Poppy Adams, The Behaviour of Moths

Nothing new has particularly caught my eye this week, so I thought I would highlight a book from earlier in the year which I am now reading. The Behaviour of Moths is a first novel by Poppy Adams, a documentary filmmaker with a Natural Science degree who has made films for the BBC, Channel 4 and the Discovery Channel. She has three children and lives with her husband in London. The book is clearly informed by a close knowledge of moths, and has a Victorian Gothic mood. It was published in the US under the alternative title of The Sister. Signed first editions are still available at cover price.

From her lookout on the first floor, Ginny watches and waits for her adored younger sister to return to the crumbling mansion that was once their idyllic childhood home. Vivien has not stepped foot in the house since she left, forty seven years ago; Ginny, the reclusive lepidopterist, has rarely ventured outside it. The remembrance of their youth, of loss, and of old rivalries plays across Ginny's mind. Why is Vivi coming home? Ginny has been selling off the family furniture over the years, gradually shutting off each wing of the house and retreating into the precise routines and isolation that define her days. Only the attic remains untouched. There, collected over several generations, are walls lined with pinned and preserved Bordered Beauties and Rusty Waves, Feathered Footmen and Great Brocades, Purple Cloud, Angle Shades, the Gothic and the Stranger ...

Haruki Murakami Bibliography - an update

I have held off updating the Haruki Murakami bibliography until I was certain about the limited edition of What I talk about when I talk about Running. The book was released as a Knopf hardcover in the US in July, and in August as a hardcover by Harvill Secker. I have not seen any signed copies of the trade editions, which is perhaps not surprising given the current rarity of Murakami's signature. However, a signed limited UK edition in a slipcase (only 75 copies) has now been released by Harvill Secker, and this will be in demand by collectors as the smallest run of a Murakami limited edition to date (with the exception of Sleep). There is currently (3/9/08) one copy on ABEbooks and one on Ebay if anyone is interested! The title is apparently derived from Raymond Carver's What We Talk About When We Talk About Love, and is a reflection by Murakami on running, writing and the relationship between the two. Also just released is a Murakami Diary for 2009, published as a paperback in both the UK and US by Vintage.

Book of the week and Bibliography - Aleksander Hemon, The Lazarus Project

The Lazarus Project is the second novel by Aleksandar Hemon. Hemon was born in Sarajevo in 1964 and Graduated from University of Sarajevo in 1990. In 1992, he arrived in Chicago on what was planned to be a short visit, but he was soon stranded in the U.S. as Sarajevo fell under siege. When it became clear that he would be in the U.S. more or less permanently, he gave himself five years to master enough English to write fiction. He has subsequently earned widespread literary acclaim, and has been hailed as a major international writer. Of course, this is still early in his career, but it is probably a good time to seek out signed first editions of all of his books.

On 2 March 1908, nineteen-year-old Lazarus Averbuch, a Russian Jewish immigrant to Chicago, tried to deliver a letter to the home of the city's Chief of Police, George Shippy. Instead of taking the letter, Shippy shot Averbuch twice, killing him. Lazarus Averbuch, Shippy claimed, was an anarchist assassin and an agent of foreign operatives who wanted to bring the United States to its knees. His sister, Olga, was left alone and bereft in a city - and country - seething with political and ethnic tensions. In the twenty-first century, Brik, a young Bosnian writer in Chicago, becomes obsessed with finding out the truth of what happened to Lazarus. And so Brik and his friend Rora, a charming and unreliable photographer, set off on a journey back to Lazarus Averbuch's birthplace, through a history of pogroms and poverty and a present of gangsters and prostitutes.

Bibliography

The Question of Bruno (2000, Doubleday, USA ;Picador, UK)
Nowhere Man (2002, Doubleday, USA; 2003, Picador, UK)
The Lazarus Project (2008, Riverhead, USA; Picador, UK)
Love and Obstacles (2009, Riverhead, USA; Picador,UK)


Other books

The Drawer (2004, Lenox Hill Bookshop, New York, USA; 200 copies signed by author)
A Coin (2006, Picador Shots, UK)

Book of the Week - Tony Black, Paying for it

There is a little of the summer to go yet, so still time to pick up late holiday reading. "Paying for it" is Tartan Noir at its best, a first novel set in Edinburgh by Tony Black. Highly recommended, as the first in a new series set in Edinburgh, in an increasingly popular genre, and with good reviews.

Gus Dury once had a high-flying career as a journalist and a wife he adored. But now he is living on the edge, a drink away from Edinburgh's down-and-outs, drifting from bar to bar, trying not to sign divorce papers. But the road takes an unexpected turn when a friend asks him to investigate the brutal torture and killing of his son, and Gus becomes embroiled in a much bigger story of political corruption and illegal people-trafficking. Seedy doss-houses, bleak wastelands and sudden violence contrast with the cobbled streets and cool bistros of fashionable Edinburgh, as the puzzle unravels to a truly shocking ending.

Book of the week and Bibliography - Jason Goodwin, The Bellini Card

Jason Goodwin's Ottoman Eunuch sleuth, Yashim, made his appearance in the 2007 novel The Janissary Tree, which won the Edgar Award for best mystery. The third book in the series, The Bellini Card, has just appeared. It takes Yashim from the winding alleyways of Istanbul to the decaying grandeur of Venice. Charged by the Sultan to find a stolen painting by Bellini, he enlists the help of his friend Palewski, the Polish Ambassador, and goes undercover. Venice in 1840 is a city of empty palazzos and silent canals, and Palewski starts to mingle with Venetian dealers - self-made men, faded aristocrats and the hedonistic Contessa. But when two bodies turn up in the canal, he realises that art in Venice is a deadly business. These are enjoyable books which are steeped in the history of the Ottoman Empire – a series well worth collecting at this relatively early stage.

Bibliography

Lords of the Horizons – A History of the Ottoman Empire (Chatto and Windus, 1998)
Greenback – The Almighty Dollar and the Invention of America (Hamish Hamilton, 2003)


Yashim the Eunuch

The Janissary Tree (Faber, 2006)
The Snake Stone (Faber, 2007)
The Bellini Card (Faber, 2008)
An Evil Eye (Faber, 2011)

Book of the week and Bibliography - Richard Morgan, The Steel Remains

So, after my quick world tour I return with another Book of the Week. I have been avidly reading Richard Morgan’s books since Altered Carbon was published in 2002 by Gollancz. A signed copy is now likely to cost £200 plus from a dealer, and he has subsequently kept up the same high standard. The books are exciting, innovative and at times deal with serious issues. The Steel Remains, which has just been published, represents a slight departure into fantasy rather than science fiction – I am currently awaiting my copy, and I suspect it will be just as good a read as his previous books.

Ringil, the hero of the bloody slaughter at Gallows Gap, is a legend to all who don't know him and a twisted degenerate to those that do. A veteren of the wars against the lizards he makes a living from telling credulous travellers of his exploits. Until one day he is pulled away from his life and into the depths of the Empire's slave trade. Where he will discover a secret infinitely more frightening than the trade in lives. Archeth - pragmatist, cynic and engineer, the last of her race - is called from her work at the whim of the most powerful man in the Empire and sent to its farthest reaches to investigate a demonic incursion against the Empire's borders. Egar Dragonbane, steppe-nomad, one-time fighter for the Empire finds himself entangled in a small-town battle between common sense and religious fervour. But out in the wider world there is something on the move far more alien than any of his tribe's petty gods. Anti-social, anti-heroic, and decidedly irritated, all three of them are about to be sent unwillingly forth into a vicious, vigorous and thoroughly unsuspecting fantasy world.


Bibliography

Altered Carbon (Gollancz, 2002)
Broken Angels (Gollancz, 2003)
Market Forces (Gollancz, 2004)
Woken Furies (Gollancz, 2005)
Black Man (Gollancz, 2007) – published in the US as Thirteen by Del Rey
The Steel Remains (Gollancz, 2008)


Graphic Novels

Black Widow – Homecoming (Marvel Comics, 2005; 6 parts)
Black Widow – The things they say about her (Marvel Comics, 2006; 6 parts)