Hilary Mantel’s “masterful” conclusion to her Thomas Cromwell trilogy, The Mirror and the Light, has been featured on the long list for the Booker Prize, putting the British novelist on the run to win an unprecedented third time.
Mantel’s 900-page novel, which opens after Anne Boleyn has been beheaded in 1536, and traces the last years of Cromwell, is one of 13 novels in this year’s £ 50,000 prize race. The judges chaired by publisher Margaret Busby said the “masterful display of cunning dialogue and exquisite description brings the Tudor world to life.”
The novelist, who won the Booker for the previous two novels in her trilogy, Wolf Hall and Bring Up the Bodies, is one of only four authors to win the prestigious award twice, alongside Margaret Atwood, Peter Carey, and JM Coetzee. No writer has won three times yet.
Mantel has said that while “it will be launched in terms of a disaster if I don’t win it again,” I would not perceive it as a slight if it loses.
The New Wilderness by Diane Cook (USA)
Sugar burned by Avni Doshi (USA)
Who They Were by Gabriel Krauze (UK)
Brandon Taylor’s Real Life (US)
Shuggie Bain by Douglas Stuart (Scotland-USA)
In a long list of surprises and debuts, chosen from 162 novels, Mantel faces leading literary names, including American author Anne Tyler, chosen for Redhead by the Side of the Road, a play judges call “a story. of very human redemption, “as well as Irish-American author Colum McCann, on Apeirogon’s long list, about a Palestinian and an Israeli, who have lost their daughters.
Zimbabwean award-winning author Tsitsi Dangarembga is competing for This Mournable Body, a sequel to her 1988 novel Nervous Nerves, named by the BBC as one of the 100 books that shaped the world. The judges said this pitiful body “triggered an immediate reaction like a strong inhalation from all of us on the panel.” Ethiopian-American author Maaza Mengiste is nominated for her second novel The King of Shadows, set during the Italian invasion of Ethiopia in 1935 and praised by the judges as “a brave, noble, and enthralling book that would not have been written anywhere else moment in history. “
New novels by established writers, including Maggie O’Farrell, Curtis Sittenfeld, David Mitchell, Ali Smith, Marilynne Robinson, and Ben Lerner, failed to make the cut. Instead, the judges kicked off during eight debuts, including Kiley Reid’s Such a Fun Age, which begins when a black woman is accused of kidnapping the white girl she’s caring for, and C Pam Zhang How Much of These Hills Is Gold, in the one that two Chinese children try to survive in the 19th century American West after the death of their impoverished parents.
Other debuts include Real Life by American author Brandon Taylor, following a strange, introverted black man from Alabama, who was described by the judges as “a deeply painful and nuanced account of microaggression, abuse, racism, homophobia, trauma, grief and alienation. ” . Avni Doshi’s Burnt Sugar, in which an Indian woman recalls her childish neglect when her elderly mother’s memory begins to fade, was praised as “completely convincing.” And Shuggie Bain, by American Scottish author Douglas Stuart, after a boy’s childhood in a Glasgow public dwelling in the 1980s, was called “an incredibly intimate, compassionate, and passionate portrait of addiction, courage, and love “
The independent press Oneworld, which won two consecutive Booker Awards with Marlon James’ A Brief History of Seven Killings and Paul Beatty’s The Sellout, is also making the cut this year for Diane Cook’s The New Wilderness, the storyteller’s first novel. After a mother leaving a polluted metropolis with her young daughter to participate in a radical experiment in the dangerous “Desert,” the judges called it a “wonderfully imagined novel … tense in the future.”
Gaby Wood, literary director of the Booker Prize Foundation, said even the judges were surprised by the number of debuts.
“It is an unusually high proportion, and especially surprising for the judges themselves, who had admired many books by more established authors, and regretted having to let them go,” Wood said. “Perhaps it is obvious that powerful stories can come from unexpected places and in unknown ways; however, this kaleidoscopic list serves as a reminder. “
Six years after the Booker Prize decided to open its doors to any writer who writes in English and publishes in the United Kingdom, sparking widespread concern about the possible dominance of American novelists, nine of the 13 writers for the this year they are Americans or have a dual American heritage.
Only three are from the UK: Mantel and debut novelists Gabriel Krauze and Sophie Ward. Krauze explores violence and revenge in London in Who They Was, while Ward’s Love and Other Thought Experiments talks about the couple Rachel and Eliza, in a job the judges described as “an extremely original and genre novel that fuses analytical philosophy. Anglo-American with realistic social drama and futuristic science fiction. “
Busby, whose panel of judges includes suspense writer Lee Child, poet Lemn Sissay, critic Sameer Rahim and classicist Emily Wilson, said each of the 13 novels selected by the judges “has had an impact that has earned him a place in the long list. “
“There are often unknown minority voices, fresh, bold and absorbing stories. The best fiction allows the reader to relate to other people’s lives; Sharing experiences that we could not have imagined is as powerful as being able to identify with the characters, “he said, describing the combination of new and established authors as” a really satisfying result. “
A restricted list of six books will be unveiled on September 15, with the winner to be announced in November.
.
