The Man Booker Prize 2011 |
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The Sense of an Ending
By Julian Barnes
The story of a man coming to terms with the mutable past, Julian Barnes's new novel is laced with his trademark precision, dexterity and insight. It is the work of one of the world's most distinguished writers.
Tony Webster and his clique first met Adrian Finn at school. Sex-hungry and book-hungry, they navigated the girl drought of gawky adolescence together, trading in affectations, in-jokes, rumour and wit. Maybe Adrian was a little more serious than the others, certainly more intelligent, but they swore to stay friends forever. Until Adrian's life took a turn into tragedy, and all of them, especially Tony, moved on and did their best to forget.
Now Tony is in middle age. He's had a career and a marriage, a calm divorce. He gets along nicely, he thinks, with his one child, a daughter, and even with his ex-wife. He's certainly never tried to hurt anybody. Memory, though, is imperfect. It can always throw up surprises, as a lawyer's letter is about to prove. The unexpected bequest conveyed by that letter leads Tony on a dogged search through a past suddenly turned murky. And how do you carry on, contentedly, when events conspire to upset all your vaunted truths?
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Jamrach's Menagerie
By Carol Birch
Jaffy Brown is running along a street in London's East End when he comes face to face with an escaped circus animal. Plucked from the jaws of death by Mr Jamrach - explorer, entrepreneur and collector of the world's strangest creatures - the two strike up a friendship.Before he knows it, Jaffy finds himself on board a ship bound for the Dutch East Indies, on an unusual commission for Mr Jamrach. His journey - if he survives it - will push faith, love and friendship to their utmost limits.
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The Sisters Brothers
By Patrick deWitt
Hermann Kermit Warm is going to die. The enigmatic and powerful man known only as the Commodore has ordered it, and his henchmen, Eli and Charlie Sisters, will make sure of it. Though Eli doesn't share his brother's appetite for whiskey and killing, he's never known anything else. But their prey isn't an easy mark, and on the road from Oregon City to Warm's gold-mining claim outside Sacramento, Eli begins to question what he does for a living, and whom he does it for.
With The Sisters Brothers, Patrick deWitt pays homage to the classic Western, transforming it into an unforgettable comic tour de force. Filled with a remarkable cast of characters losers, cheaters, and ne'er-do-wells from all stripes of life, and told by a complex and compelling narrator, it is a violent, lustful odyssey through the underworld of the 1850s frontier that beautifully captures the humor, melancholy, and grit of the Old West and two brothers bound by blood, violence, and love.
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Half Blood Blues
By Esi Edugyan
Chip told us not to go out. Said, don't you boys tempt the devil. But it been one brawl of a night, I tell you.The aftermath of the fall of Paris, 1940. Hieronymous Falk, a rising star on the cabaret scene, was arrested in a cafe and never heard from again. He was twenty years old. He was a German citizen. And he was black.Fifty years later, Sid, Hiero's bandmate and the only witness that day, is going back to Berlin. Persuaded by his old friend Chip, Sid discovers there's more to the journey than he thought when Chip shares a mysterious letter, bringing to the surface secrets buried since Hiero's fate was settled. In Half Blood Blues, Esi Edugyan weaves the horror of betrayal, the burden of loyalty and the possibility that, if you don't tell your story, someone else might tell it for you. And they just might tell it wrong.
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Pigeon English
By Stephen Kelman
Lying in front of Harrison Opuku is a body, the body of one of his classmates, a boy known for his crazy basketball skills, who seems to have been murdered for his dinner.
Armed with a pair of camouflage binoculars and detective techniques absorbed from television shows like CSI, Harri and his best friend, Dean, plot to bring the perpetrator to justice. They gather evidence,fingerprints lifted from windows with tape, a wallet stained with blood and lay traps to flush out the murderer. But nothing can prepare them for what happens when a criminal feels you closing in on him.
Recently emigrated from Ghana with his sister and mother to London's enormous housing projects, Harri is pure curiosity and ebullience obsessed with gummy candy, a friend to the pigeon who visits his balcony, quite possibly the fastest runner in his school, and clearly also fast on the trail of a murderer.
Told in Harri's infectious voice and multicultural slang, Pigeon English follows in the tradition of our great novels of friendship and adventure, as Harri finds wonder, mystery, and danger in his new, ever-expanding world.
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Snowdrops
By A.D. Miller
Nick Platt is a British lawyer working in Moscow in the early 2000s, a place where the cascade of oil money, the tightening grip of the government, the jostling of the oligarchs, and the loosening of Soviet social mores have led to a culture where corruption, decadence, violence, and betrayal define everyday life. Nick doesn't ask too many questions about the shady deals he works on, he's too busy enjoying the exotic, surreally sinful nightlife Moscow has to offer.
One day in the subway, he rescues two willowy sisters, Masha and Katya, from a would-be purse snatcher. Soon Nick, the seductive Masha, and long-limbed Katya are cruising the seamy glamour spots of the city. Nick begins to feel something for Masha that he is pleased to think is love. Then the sisters ask Nick to help their aged aunt, Tatiana, find a new apartment.
Of course, nothing is as it seems, including this extraordinary debut novel. The twists in the story take it far beyond its noirish frame,the sordid and vivid portrayal of Moscow serves as a backdrop for a book that examines the irresistible allure of sin, featuring characters whose hearts are as cold as the Russian winter.
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On Canaan's Side
By Sebastian Barry
Told in the first person, as a narrative of Lilly Bere's life over seventeen days, On Canaan's Side opens as she mourns the loss of her grandson, Bill. Lilly revisits her past, going back to the moment she was forced to flee Ireland, at the end of the First World War, and continues her tale in America, a world filled with both hope and danger. At once epic and intimate, Lilly's story unfolds as she tries to make sense of the sorrows and troubles of her life and of the people whose lives she has touched. Spanning nearly seven decades, from the Great Depression to World War II and the Vietnam War, it is the heartbreaking story of a woman whose capability to love is enormous, and whose compassion, even for those who have wronged her, is astonishing.
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A Cupboard Full of Coats
By Yvvette Edwards
Redolent of Monica Ali and Zadie Smith, Yvvette Edwards' bold debut is a searing story of family, jealousy, and tragic betrayal."He just knocked, that was all, knoced at the front door and waited, like the fourteen years since the night I'd killed my mother hadn't happened at all..."Fourteen years ago, Jinx' mother was brutally murdered in their East London home. Overwhelmed by the part she played, Jinx's whole life has been poisoned by guilt. Then, out of nowhere, Lemon arrives on her doorstep. An old friend of her mother's, he wants to revisit the events leading to that terrible night, forcing Jinx to finally confront her past, and offering her the possibility of redemption alongside the pain of remembrance. Estranged from her husband and detached from her son, Jinx knows that this is her only chance to make her confession, and end the emotional paralysis that has blighted her life. But Lemon has his own secrets to share, and over the course of one weekend they unravel an unforgettable family drama, stoked with violence and passion.Rich with voices from East London and the West Indies, Edward's narrative is delivered with a unique and uncompromsing bight that announces a new talent in British fiction.
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 The Stranger's Child
By Alan Hollinghurst
Alan Hollinghurst's first novel since The Line of Beauty, winner of the 2004 Man Booker Prize. It is the late summer of the last year before the first Great War. Cecil Valance, a beautiful young aristocratic poet, is visiting Two Acres, the home of his Cambridge friend and lover, George Sawle. On his departure, Cecil leaves a poem, dedicated to George's younger sister Daphne, which when published becomes a touchstone for a generation, symbolizing an England in its final glory. Meanwhile Daphne has also become involved with Cecil's family, visiting their Victorian Gothic country house, Corley, and developing a relationship with Cecil's brooding, manipulative brother, Dudley, that will link the families for ever. THE STRANGER'S CHILD begins as a novel about two families and two houses: by the time it reaches its profound and moving conclusion, it has become an epic tale told in five parts covering almost a hundred years. Like The Line of Beauty, this is a deliciously funny novel, glittering with acute observation and arch insight into the worlds of those who belong and of those who are excluded, of carefully hidden secrets which are finally, dramatically revealed.
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The Last Hundred Days
By Patrick McGuinness
The socialist state is in crisis, the shops are empty and old Bucharest vanishes daily under the onslaught of Ceaucescu's demolition gangs. Paranoia is pervasive and secret service men lurk in the shadows.
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Far to Go
By Alison Pick
When Czechoslovakia relinquishes the Sudetenland to Hitler, the powerful influence of Nazi propaganda sweeps through towns and villages like a sinister vanguard of the Reich's advancing army. A fiercely patriotic secular Jew, Pavel Bauer is helpless to prevent his world from unraveling as first his government, then his business partners, then his neighbors turn their back on his affluent, once-beloved family. Only the Bauers' adoring governess, Marta, sticks by Pavel, his wife, Anneliese, and their little son, Pepik, bound by her deep affection for her employers and friends. But when Marta learns of their impending betrayal at the hands of her lover, Ernst, Pavel's best friend, she is paralyzed by her own fear of discovery, even as the endangered family for whom she cares so deeply struggles with the most difficult decision of their lives.
Interwoven with a present-day narrative that gradually reveals the fate of the Bauer family during and after the war, Far to Go is a riveting family epic, love story, and psychological drama.
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The Testament of Jessie Lamb
By Jane Rogers
Jessie Lamb is an ordinary girl living in extraordinary times: as her world collapses, her idealism and courage drive her towards the ultimate act of heroism. If the human race is to survive, it's up to her. Set just a month or two in the future, in a world irreparably altered by an act of biological terrorism, The Testament of Jessie Lamb explores a young woman's determination to make her life count for something, as the certainties of her childhood are ripped apart.
Jane Rogers has written eight novels including Her living Image (Somerset Maugham Award), Mr Wroe's Virgins (Guardian Fiction Prize runner-up), Promised Lands (Writers Guild Best Novel Award), Island (Orange long-listed), and The Voyage Home. She has written drama for radio and TV, including an award-winning adaptation of Mr Wroe's Virgins for BBC2. Her radio work includes both original drama and Classic Serial adaptations. She has taught writing at the University of Adelaide, Paris Sorbonne IV, and on a radio-writing project in Eastern Uganda. She is Professor of Writing at Sheffield Hallam University, and is a Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature. Jane lives on the edge of the moors in Lancashire.
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Derby Day
By D.J. Taylor
In the heat of June all England seems to head for Epsom downs - aristocrats and beggars, society beauties and street girls,bookies and gypsies, hawkers and acrobats, punters and thieves - whole families are streaming along the dusty roads, heading for the greatest race of the year. Hopes are high, nerves are taut, hats are tossed in the air for this is Derby Day. For months, people have been waiting and plotting for this day. Even in snowy January, when snowflakes drift into foggy London courts, and the wind whistles through the alleys, the ale-house talk turns on the race. Across town, in smart Kensington, old Mr Gresham is baffled by his tigerish daughter Rebecca, who seems to have something on her mind. In the clubs of St James's, the rakish Mr Happerton plays billiards with his crony Captain Raff, while out at Scroop Hall sad Mr Davenant broods over his champion horse Tiberius, and waits for his daughter's new governess. Across the channel, the veteran burglar Mr Pardew is packing his bags to return. Everywhere money jingles and plans are laid. As the months pass the pace quickens and dastardly deeds are done, foxing even the stalwart police detective Captain MacTurk. In this exuberant, rolling novel, rich with the idioms of Victorian England, the mysteries pile high, carrying us up to the downs on the day of the great race, waiting with bated breath asthe story gallops to a finish that no one expects.
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