Set in Luton, Barker’s ninth novel brings together an eclectic cast in a hotel bar, from an agoraphobic tattooist to a failing golfer and a Muslim sex therapist. “Remember: in Barkerland, it is the norm to be weird,” advised the Observer’s reviewer Kate Kellaway. The English novelist was shortlisted for the Booker in 2008, for Darkmans, but has yet to win the award
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Following up on his prizewinning debut, Boxer, Beetle, Beauman takes us on a noirish, whistlestop tour through history, via Berlin and Paris in the 1930s to 17th-century France, in order to tell the story of Renaissance stage designer Adriano Lavicini and his 20th-century admirer Egon Loeser, whose only real interest is getting himself laid
Interview: Ned Beauman on The Teleportation Accident
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The celebrated South African novelist, twice shortlisted for the Booker in the past, makes the longlist this year for Philida, the story of a slave on the Cape in 1832, based on the story of his own family. She has four children by the son of her master, Francois Brink, who has gone back on his promise to free her. When Philida learns she is to be sold to new owners, she sets off on a journey with a Muslim slave, Labyn, across the great wilderness
Andre Brink: a life in writing
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Set in Malaya in 1949 in the shadow of the second world war, Eng’s second novel tells the story of Yun Ling Teoh, a lawyer involved in the prosecution of Japanese war criminals, and herself a survivor of a Japanese war camp. She seeks solace in the mountaintop garden of the title and, despite her hatred of the Japanese, enters into an apprenticeship with its Japanese gardener, Aritomo. But Malaya’s political breakdown and the unanswered questions surrounding each of them threaten their fragile friendship
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The playwright and novelist has won most awards going but has yet to take the Booker, despite a shortlisting in 1999 for Headlong. He is nominated this year for the mistaken-identity comic novel Skios, set on a Greek island where Dr Norman Wilfred is set to lecture on the scientific organisation of science
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Interview: Michael Frayn on Skios
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Joyce’s debut novel, which began life as a radio play in 1996, was spurred by her own father’s diagnosis with cancer. Retired brewery manager Harold receives a letter from onetime colleague Queenie from the hospice in Berwick-on-Tweed where she’s dying. Harold goes out to post his reply to her - and instead finds himself walking the length of the country to deliver his letter by hand
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A young woman stalks a famously brutal English poet on holiday with his family in the south of France. She makes friends with his daughter and spies on his wife who, for her own reasons, invites the young woman to stay. Set over five days in the July heatwave of 1994, Levy’s first novel in 15 years is a dangerous and moving interrogation of how the most interesting secrets are the ones we keep from ourselves
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Bring Up the Bodies takes up where Mantel’s 2009 Booker-winning life of Thomas Cromwell, Wolf Hall, left off. With Henry becoming disaffected with Anne Boleyn, it falls to Cromwell to disburden him of his second wife. Every bit as tenebrous and convoluted as its predecessor, and with the same enigma at its heart, Bring Up the Bodies stands a chance of making Booker history as the first sequel to win the prize
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The second novel about walking on the longlist, after The Unlikely Pilgrimage of Harold Fry, Moore’s debut, published by tiny independent press Salt, is about a man trying to find himself on a walking holiday in Germany, only to become more lost and adrift. ‘Melancholy and haunting”, said Margaret Drabble of this unsettling account of paths not taken.
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Self’s latest novel isn’t out until October, but the synopsis being bruited around is intriguing. A maverick psychiatrist working in a vast Victorian mental asylum attempts to wake up victims of the encephalitis lethargica sleeping sickness epidemic at the end of the first world war - with unforeseen consequences.
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‘I wished that this book, like some long and delicious opium-induced daydream, would go on and on’, wrote the Guardian reviewer. In his debut novel, Indian poet Thayil chronicles the way that opium dens in 1970s Mumbai gave way to heroin addiction and a brutal modernity. Thayil has spoken of his own lost decades of alcoholism and addiction: "I spent most of that time sitting in bars, getting very drunk, talking about writers and writing. And never writing. It was a colossal waste. In two years I've done more than I did in 20.” Listen to a podcast interview with Jeet Thayil
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‘Have you noticed how each of us conjures up our own city?’ asks this mercurial debut made up of 10 interlinked tales, told in various styles and genres, about a nameless, constantly shifting city. “Dreamlike and gnarly”, says China Miéville, with atmosphere aplenty, nods to Borges and Calvino, and references to urban icons from Sherlock Holmes to Jack the Ripper
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