In the week that the Man Booker longlist is announced we look at the books that made it – and the ones that got away. We discuss the idiosyncracies of judging panels with a former Booker judge and we find out about the books our readers are disappointed not to see on the list.
Then we defect to non-fiction to talk to the permanent secretary of the Swedish Academy, Peter Englund, about the first world war, a subject the Booker frontrunner Alan Hollinghurst deftly steers around in The Stranger's Child. Englund charts the human impact of the conflict from Petrograd to Beho Beho in a novelistic patchwork of first-hand accounts, putting The Sorrow and the Beauty much closer to Booker material than conventional history usually allows.
He talks about the advantages of abandoning the historian's god's-eye view, and his own intimate experience of war as a correspondent in Croatia, Bosnia, Afghanistan and Iraq.
Reading list
The Beauty and the Sorrow by Peter Englund is published in October by Profile
