Recommended Reading
Man Booker Prize 2009
The winner of the 2009 Man Booker Prize was Wolf Hall by Hilary Mantel
The thirteen longlisted authors and titles are:
The Children's Book - A. S. Byatt
Summertime - J. M. Coetzee
The Quickening Maze - Adam Foulds
How to Paint a Dead Man - Sarah Hall
The Wilderness - Samantha Harvey
Me Cheeta - James Lever
Wolf Hall - Hilary Mantel
The Glass Room - Simon Mawer
Not Untrue and Not Unkind - Ed O'Loughlin
Heliopolis - James Scudamore
Brooklyn - Colm Toibin
Love and Summer - William Trevor
The Little Stranger - Sarah Waters
The Impac Shortlist 2009
The 2009 Impac Award Shortlist was announced on 2nd April by the Lord Mayor of Dublin and Patron of the Award, Eibhlin Byrne.The shortlist was drawn from the 146 titles nominated for this year’s award. 157 public libraries were involved in the nominations. Dublin City Public Libraries administrate the award which is sponsored by Impac, an international productivity improvement company, with the aim of promoting excellence in world literature. The prizewinner, Michael Thomas for the book Man Gone Down, was awarded €100,000 making the Impac Award the most valuable of the literary awards.
All of the shortlisted titles are available in Sligo Libraries.
The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao by Junot Díaz (Dominican / American) Riverhead Books
Things have never been easy for Oscar. A ghetto nerd living with his Dominican family in New Jersey, he's sweet but disastrously overweight. He dreams of becoming the next J. R. R. Tolkien and he keeps falling hopelessly in love. Poor Oscar may never get what he wants, thanks to the Fuku - the curse that has haunted his family for generations. With dazzling energy and insight Diaz immerses us in the tumultuous lives of Oscar; his runaway sister Lola; their beautiful mother Belicia; and in the family's uproarious journey from the Dominican Republic to the US and back.
Ravel by Jean Echenoz (French) in translation. The New Press
The last years of the great French composer's life as envisioned by "the master magician of the contemporary French novel" ("The Washington Post") A bestseller in France, "Ravel" is a beguiling and original evocation of the last ten years in the life of a musical genius, written by the acclaimed novelist Jean Echenoz, winner of the Prix Goncourt. The book opens in 1927 as Maurice Ravel--dandy, eccentric, and curmudgeon--voyages across the Atlantic aboard the luxurious ocean liner the France to begin his triumphant grand tour across the United States, where he will travel aboard such fabled trains as the "Zephyr," the "Hiawatha," and the "Sunset Limited," smoking his precious stash of Gauloises along the way.
The Reluctant Fundamentalist by Mohsin Hamid (Pakistani / British) Hamish Hamilton / Harcourt / Doubleday Canada
At a cafe table in Lahore, a Pakistani man begins the tale that has led to his fateful meeting with an uneasy American stranger...Changez is living an immigrant's dream of America. He thrives on the energy of New York, his work at an elite firm, and his budding relationship. For a time, it seems that nothing will stand in the way of his meteoric rise to success. But in the wake of September 11, Changez finds his relationship crumbling and his exalted status overturned. Allegiances are subsequently unearthed, proving themselves more fundamental than money, power and maybe even love.
The Archivist’s Story by Travis Holland (American) Dial Press
Holland writes exquisitely The beauty and reality of this novel linger long after one has read - reluctantly - its last page' Elizabeth Kostova, author of The Historian 'Pavel's story is told in uninflected prose, as if embellishing the harsh, despairing world the characters inhabit would somehow be morally false. The simple style makes its flashes of eloquence and sombre imagery even more startling' Time Out 'An extraordinary first novel exquisite The novel is a wrenching threnody of human suffering
The Burnt-Out Town of Miracles by Roy Jacobsen (Norwegian) in translation. John Murray Publishers
Set in Finland in 1939, The Burnt-Out Town of Miracles is the story of one man who remains in his home town when everyone else has fled, burning down their houses in their wake, before the invading Russians arrive. Timo remains behind because he can't imagine life anywhere else, doing anything else besides felling the trees near his home. This is a novel about belonging - a tale of powerful and forbidden friendships forged during a war, of unexpected bravery and astonishing survival instincts.
The Indian Clerk by David Leavitt (American) Bloomsbury Publishing
On a January morning in 1913, G. H. Hardy - eccentric, charismatic and, at thirty-seven, already considered the greatest British mathematician of his age - receives a mysterious envelope covered with Indian stamps. Inside he finds a rambling letter from a self-professed mathematical genius who claims to be on the brink of solving the most important unsolved mathematical problem of his time.
Animal’s People by Indra Sinha (Indian / British) Simon and Schuster
'I used to be human once. So I'm told. I don't remember it myself, but people who knew me when I was small say I walked on two feet just like a human being...' Ever since he can remember, Animal has gone on all fours, the catastrophic result of what happened on That Night when, thanks to an American chemical company, the Apocalypse visited his slum. Now not quite twenty, he leads a hand-to-mouth existence with his dog Jara and a crazy old nun called Ma Franci, and spends his nights fantasising about Nisha, the daughter of a local musician, and wondering what it must be like to get laid.
Man Gone Down by Michael Thomas (American) Grove / Atlantic
Beautifully written, insightful, and devastating first novel, Man Gone Down is about a young black father of three in a biracial marriage trying to claim a piece of the American Dream he has bargained on since youth. On the eve of the unnamed narrator's thirty-fifth birthday, he finds himself broke, estranged from his white Boston Brahmin wife and three children, and living in the bedroom of a friend's six-year-old child. He has four days to come up with the money to keep his family afloat, four days to try to make some sense of his life.
Orange Prize for Fiction Shortlist 2009
The shortlist for the Orange Prize for Fiction has been announced at the LBF by broadcaster Fi Glover, who commented: "We have stretched our heads getting to this shortlist! We were right down to the wire on several of the books and choosing just six was far harder than I had imagined, but we all left the judging room proud of the list we have chosen." The award winner, Home by Marilyanne Robinson, was announced in June 2009.
Scottsboro - Feldman, Ellen
It is Alabama, 1931. A posse stops a freight train and arrests nine black youths. Their crime: fighting with white boys. Then two white girls emerge from another freight car, and fast as anyone can say Jim Crow, the cry of rape goes up. One of the girls sticks to her story. The other changes her tune, again and again. A young journalist, whose only connection to the incident is her overheated social conscience, fights to save the nine youths from the electric chair, redeem the girl who repents her lie, and make amends for her own past.Intertwining historical actors and fictional characters, stirring racism, sexism, and anti-Semitism into an explosive brew, "Scottsboro" is a novel of a shocking injustice that convulsed the nation and reverberated around the world, destroyed lives, forged careers, and brought out the worst and the best in the men and women who fought for the cause. 'Feldman suggests that though the past will always be there, it's not fixed like the timeline history taught at school, nor impermeable to the present ...This is a brave novel in the strongest sense of the word, carefully treading mined terrain to thought-provoking and memorable effect' - "Observer".
Wilderness - Harvey, Samantha
It's Jake's birthday. He is sitting in a small plane, being flown over the landscape that has been the backdrop to his life - his childhood, his marriage, his work, his passions. Now he is in his early sixties, and he isn't quite the man he used to be. He has lost his wife, his son is in prison, and he is about to lose his past. Jake has Alzheimer's. As the disease takes hold of him, Jake struggles to hold on to his personal story, to his memories and identity, but they become increasingly elusive and unreliable. What happened to his daughter? Is she alive, or long dead? And why exactly is his son in prison? What went so wrong in his life? There was a cherry tree once, and a yellow dress, but what exactly do they mean?As Jake, assisted by 'poor Eleanor', a childhood friend with whom for some unfathomable reason he seems to be sleeping, fights the inevitable dying of the light, the key events of his life keep changing as he tries to grasp them, and what until recently seemed solid fact is melting into surreal dreams or nightmarish imaginings. Is there anything he'll be able to salvage from the wreckage? Beauty, perhaps, the memory of love, or nothing at all?From the first sentence to the last, "The Wilderness" holds us in its grip. This is writing of extraordinary power and beauty.
Invention of Everything Else - Hunt, Samantha
Louisa is an imaginative and curious chambermaid who, while cleaning rooms at the New Yorker Hotel, stumbles across a man living permanently in room 3327, which he has transformed into a scientific laboratory. Brought together by a shared interest in the pigeons that nest in the hotel, Louisa discovers that the mysterious guest is Nikola Tesla, one of the most brilliant - and most neglected - inventors of the twentieth century. "The Invention of Everything Else" charts the relationship of the girl and the genius during the last week of Tesla's life, when sinister forces are closing in on him. However, as well as being an engaging literary mystery, this exceptional novel movingly tells the life story of this extraordinary man and also recounts the heartbreak and redemption of one ordinary family.
Molly Fox's Birthday - Madden, Deirdre
Dublin. Midsummer. While absent in New York, the celebrated actor Molly Fox has loaned her house to a playwright friend, who is struggling to write a new work. Over the course of this, the longest day of the year, the playwright reflects upon her own life, Molly's, and that of their mutual friend Andrew, whom she has known since university. Why does Molly never celebrate her own birthday, which falls upon this day? What does it mean to be a playwright or an actor? How have their relationships evolved over the course of many years? "Molly Fox's Birthday" calls into question the ideas that we hold about who we are; and shows how the past informs the present in ways we might never have imagined.
Home - Robinson, Marilynne
Hundreds of thousands of readers were enthralled and delighted by the luminous, tender voice of John Ames in Gilead, Marilynne Robinson's Pulitzer Prize-winning novel. Now comes HOME, a deeply affecting novel that takes place in the same period and same Iowa town of Gilead. This is Jack's story. Jack ? prodigal son of the Boughton family, godson and namesake of John Ames, gone twenty years ? has come home looking for refuge and to try to make peace with a past littered with trouble and pain. A bad boy from childhood, an alcoholic who cannot hold down a job, Jack is perpetually at odds with his surroundings and with his traditionalist father, though he remains Boughton's most beloved child. His sister Glory has also returned to Gilead, fleeing her own mistakes, to care for their dying father. Brilliant, loveable, wayward, Jack forges an intense new bond with Glory and engages painfully with his father and his father's old friend John Ames.
Burnt Shadows - Shamsie, Kamila
n a prison cell in the US, a man stands trembling, naked, fearfully waiting to be shipped to Guantanamo Bay. How did it come to this, he wonders August 9th, 1945, Nagasaki. Hiroko Tanaka steps out onto her veranda, taking in the view of the terraced slopes leading up to the sky. Wrapped in a kimono with three black cranes swooping across the back, she is twenty-one, in love with the man she is to marry, Konrad Weiss. In a split second, the world turns white. In the next, it explodes with the sound of fire and the horror of realisation. In the numbing aftermath of a bomb that obliterates everything she has known, all that remains are the bird-shaped burns on her back, an indelible reminder of the world she has lost.In search of new beginnings, she travels to Delhi two years later. There she walks into the lives of Konrad's half-sister, Elizabeth, her husband James Burton, and their employee Sajjad Ashraf, from whom she starts to learn Urdu. As the years unravel, new homes replace those left behind and old wars are seamlessly usurped by new conflicts.But the shadows of history - personal, political - are cast over the entwined worlds of the Burtons, Ashrafs and the Tanakas as they are transported from Pakistan to New York, and in the novel's astonishing climax, to Afghanistan in the immediate wake of 9/11. The ties that have bound them together over decades and generations are tested to the extreme, with unforeseeable consequences.Sweeping in its scope and mesmerising in its evocation of time and place, Burnt Shadows is an epic narrative of disasters elided and confronted, loyalties offered and repaid, and loves rewarded and betrayed.
