Today! Today is the day that the Man Booker Prize Shortlist will be announced!
As you might remember, there are many reasons to get all excited about the Man Booker Prize for fiction, an award that celebrates fiction from around the world, an ultimately selecting “the very best book of the year”, according to their website…heady stuff indeed.
If you couldn’t tell by my excessive use of exclamation points in covering this award, the Man Booker Prize holds a place near and dear to my heart. Not only because it gets people talking about books, their power and their beauty, but because some of the best books I have ever read were Booker nominees. While these books aren’t necessarily quick- or easy-reads, I can almost guarantee you that each one will be thought-provoking, grippingly emotional and, above surprising. Sometimes that means there is a killer twist in the book’s final pages; sometimes it means that the character you thought was the baddie was secretly on the side of the angels the whole time; sometimes it’s because this story forced you to recognize pieces and parts of yourself that you didn’t know where there before–and that, ultimately, is the mark of a great piece of fiction.
In addition, the authors who pen these books often have fascinating stories of their own to share–even more so since the geographical parameters of the award were widened in the past few years. Shortlisted author Sunjeev Sahota didn’t open a novel until he was 18, when he picked up Rushdie’s Midnight’s Children before his flight from India to England to begin university. A mathematician by training and in practice, Sahota has since penned two novels, and reads voraciously. “I suddenly discovered this whole new world. I realised there was this storytelling language that I hadn’t ever seen or heard before,” he told the Yorkshire Post. Chigozie Obioma, one of the debut authors to be nominated, began life in Nigeria before living in Cypress, Turkey, and the US, where he teaches at the University of Nebraska. Hanya Yanagihara, author of A Little Life grew up drawing cadavers at a local morgue, after her physician father decided to blend his love of science with her love of sketching portraits. As she said in an interview with The Guardian. “…I love discovering how far a body will go to protect itself, at all costs. How hard it fights to live.”
In short, then, if you are looking for a book that will help you see wildly different personal and geographical perspectives, change the way you think about what fiction can do, look no further than the Man Booker nominees, or the many books from years’ past.
So, without further ado, here is the shortlist for the Man Booker Prize 2015. Stop into the Library and check them out for yourself, and have no fear that we’ll be covering the revelation of the final winner on October 15 with bells on!
A Spool of Blue Thread: Anne Tyler (USA)
A Brief History of Seven Killings: Marlon James (Jamaica)
Satin Island: Tom McCarthy (UK)
The Fishermen: Chigozie Obioma (Nigeria)
A Little Life: Hanya Yanagihara (USA)
The Year of the Runaways: Sunjeev Sahota (India) Not published in the US until March 2016 (Grrrr…..)
Also, here are a few more exclamation points, just because I’m really excited about this: !!!!!!!!!!!