The longlist for the Man Booker literary prize has been announced. Here we take a look back at five of the novels we’ve reviewed that have made the list of 13 writers and a sit-down interview with rising literary star and one of the favourites to win the award, Hanya Yanagihara. The shortlist will be announced on September 15 and a winner on October 13.
Book review: Andrew O’Hagan’s The Illuminations
“It’s the same effect with the myriad lights that burn brightly in the novel, slowly illuminating it from within as you turn the pages. It’s not that O’Hagan’s heavy-handed with the metaphor, but once you notice the first faint glimmers, the effect is a bit like that of the Illuminations themselves being turned on – “The pop singer hit the button and light travelled up the tower and spread from there like a beautiful, endless halo over the whole city” – a domino effect as these bursts of flame flicker through the book.”
• For the full review, click here
Book review: Anuradha Roy’s Sleeping on Jupiter
“It’s a brutal and jarring beginning, but in the context of the novel – which takes place over five days in the coastal temple town of Jarmuli in contemporary India – it’s the next chapter, less savage but no less disturbing, that unsettles the most.”
• For the full review, click here
Book review: Tom McCarthy’s Satin Island
“Somewhat surprisingly, though, I couldn’t help but find [the book] all strangely compelling; frustrating, too, but compelling and frustrating in equal measure. It’s all a search for significance; and the message that this is the holy grail that lingers just out of reach in our modern world of scrolling through endless feeds of information, and the perpetual buffering of a computer screen, rings out loud and clear.”
• For the full review, click here
Book review: Sunjeev Sahota’s The Year Of The Runaways
“This is a popular way of structuring narrative but it can be difficult to manage successfully: with each chapter the writer has to successfully re-enchant the reader. Sahota does, eventually, manage to do this: the history of each character is rich and carefully imagined, and adds depth to the account of the lives they are living in Britain. But they are also laboured and frustrating.”
• For the full review, click here
Book review: Anne Enright’s The Green Road
"Enright's books are particularly good at allowing a reader to make up their own mind about a character's thoughts or actions. Her Man Booker prize-winning novel from 2007, The Gathering was about another dysfunctional family, while The Forgotten Waltz was the story of a messy affair set against the backdrop of the recent economic crash in Ireland. This financial collapse led to a new exodus of migrants."
• For the full review, click here
Interview with Hanya Yanagihara, author of A Little Life
“On a recent trip to New York, every bookshop ... entered displayed the 700-page literary blockbuster centre stage alongside a cascade of worshipful reviews. Edmund White confessed that the ‘utterly gripping’ novel ‘kept me reading late into the night, night after night’. Cathy Rentzenbrink of British tastemaker The Bookseller declared that ‘I will be heading to the barricades if this doesn’t win prizes galore’.”
• For the full interview, click here
