Summer seems to have barely got going here in Blighty but, in literary calendar terms at least, it's already over: the Man Booker longlist comes out this afternoon, marking the start of autumn's prize season. We've complained about the proliferation of literary longlists before on this blog, so let's begin with some good news: apparently, this year's Booker longlist has shrunk. According to the official website, the longlist will consist of what they dub, somewhat queasily, a 'Man Booker dozen' - a maximum of 13 books, as opposed to the usual 18-24.
The problem is, we on the GU books desk are racking our brains to come up with 13 books that could be on it, never mind more than 20. It has been, I think, a quiet year for fiction - very few of the big name Booker stalwarts (Coetzee and McEwan aside) have published this year. Who's going to make up the numbers? We could well be looking at a very male-dominated list, too - apparently, out of the 110 entries, only 39 were by woman. Another oddity: according to the blog of the chairman, Howard Davies, 14 of the novels are set wholly or substantially during the second world war, which leads me to my only real tip - having read Owen Sheers' excellent debut, Resistance, set in a counterfactual 1944 in which Germany has invaded Britain, I suspect we may be seeing it on the list this afternoon.
But what do you think? Which great novels of the last year are we forgetting?
For a discussion of the novels which actually made the cut, see my blog post written after the announcement.
