Am 27.07.2010 hat die Jury die Longlist mit den nominierten Romanen der Autorinnen und Autoren zum diesjährigen Man Booker Prize veröffentlicht. Insgesamt wurden 138 Bücher eingereicht – 13 schafften es auf die Longlist.

Der Man Booker Prize ist mit £50.000 dotiert und gehört zu den wichtigsten Literaturauszeichnungen im englischsprachigen Raum.

Die Shortlist wird am 07.09.2010 veröffentlicht – der Gewinner wird am 12.10.2010 beim Dinner in Londons Guildhall bekanntgegeben.

Folgende Romane sind für die Longlist nominiert:

Peter Carey mit Parrot and Olivier in America

Kurzbeschreibung
Oliver ist ein französischer Aristokrat, traumatisiertes Kind der Überlebenden der Revolution, immer in Angst vor neuen Unruhen. Parrot ist der Sohn eines englischen Wanderarbeiters, der ein Künstler sein wollte aber als Diener endete. Auf ihrer Reise in die neue Welt, mal gemeinsam, mal getrennt, entdecken sie das Abenteuer der Amerikanischen Demokratie- erzählt wechselweise aus den Perspektiven von Herrn und Diener. Erfindungsreiche Erzählung einer unmöglichen Freundschaft.

Emma Donoghue mit Room

Kurzbeschreibung
Es ist sein Geburtstag und Jack findet es aufregend fünf zu werden. Er lebt mit seiner Mutter im „Zimmer“. Das „Zimmer“ hat eine abgeschlossene Tür, ein Oberlicht und misst vier mal vier Meter. Er liebt es fernzusehen, denn da sieht er seine „Freunde“, die Cartoonfiguren. Aber er weiß, dass die Dinge hinter der Mattscheibe nicht echt sind – echt sind nur Ma, er und die Dinge im Zimmer. Bis der Tag kommt, an dem Ma zugibt, dass es eine Welt da draußen gibt…
Lustig, niederschmetternd und erhebend zugleich – „Room“ ist ein Roman wie kein anderer.

Helen Dunmore mit The Betrayal

Kurzbeschreibung
Leningrad in 1952: a city recovering from war, where Andrei, a young hospital doctor and Anna, a nursery school teacher, are forging a life together. Summers at the dacha, preparations for the hospital ball, work and the care of sixteen year old Kolya fill their minds. They try hard to avoid coming to the attention of the authorities, but even so their private happiness is precarious. Stalin is still in power, and the Ministry for State Security has new targets in its sights. When Andrei has to treat the seriously ill child of a senior secret police officer, Volkov, he finds himself and his family caught in an impossible game of life and death for in a land ruled by whispers and watchfulness, betrayal can come from those closest to you.

Damon Galgut mit In A Strange Room

Kurzbeschreibung
A young man takes three journeys, through Greece, India and Africa. He travels lightly, simply. To those who travel with him and those whom he meets on the way – including a handsome, enigmatic stranger, a group of careless backpackers and a woman on the edge – he is the Follower, the Lover and the Guardian. Yet, despite the man’s best intentions, each journey ends in disaster. Together, these three journeys will change his whole life. A novel of longing and thwarted desire, rage and compassion, „In a Strange Room“ is the hauntingly beautiful evocation of one man’s search for love, and a place to call home.

Howard Jacobson mit The Finkler Question

Kurzbeschreibung
‚He should have seen it coming. His life had been one mishap after another. So he should have been prepared for this one‘. Julian Treslove, a professionally unspectacular and disappointed BBC worker, and Sam Finkler, a popular Jewish philosopher, writer and television personality, are old school friends. Despite a prickly relationship and very different lives, they’ve never quite lost touch with each other – or with their former teacher, Libor Sevick, a Czechoslovakian always more concerned with the wider world than with exam results. Now, both Libor and Finkler are recently widowed, and with Treslove, his chequered and unsuccessful record with women rendering him an honorary third widower, they dine at Libor’s grand, central London apartment. It’s a sweetly painful evening of reminiscence in which all three remove themselves to a time before they had loved and lost; a time before they had fathered children, before the devastation of separations, before they had prized anything greatly enough to fear the loss of it. Better, perhaps, to go through life without knowing happiness at all because that way you had less to mourn? Treslove finds he has tears enough for the unbearable sadness of both his friends‘ losses. And it’s that very evening, at exactly 11:30pm, as Treslove hesitates a moment outside the window of the oldest violin dealer in the country as he walks home, that he is attacked. After this, his whole sense of who and what he is will slowly and ineluctably change. „The Finkler Question“ is a scorching story of exclusion and belonging, justice and love, ageing, wisdom and humanity. Funny, furious, unflinching, this extraordinary novel shows one of our finest writers at his brilliant best.

Andrea Levy mit The Long Song

Kurzbeschreibung
Im turbulenten Jamaika des 19.Jahrhunderts lebt July als Sklavin auf der Zuckerrohrplantage „Amity“. Sie erlebt die letzten Jahre der Sklaverei, den großen Sklavenaufstand und die ersten Jahre der Freiheit …
Mit diesem Roman wirft britische Autorin Andrea Levy einen unterhaltsamen und spannenden Blick auf das Land ihrer Eltern und seine Geschichte. In ihren teils preisgekrönten Romanen reflektiert sie die Erfahrungen der schwarzen Briten und untersucht die innigen Bande, die die britische Geschichte mit der Geschichte der Kariben verbindet.

Tom McCarthy mit C

Kurzbeschreibung
The acclaimed author of Remainder, which Zadie Smith hailed as †œone of the great English novels of the past ten years,†gives us his most spectacularly inventive novel yet.
Opening in England at the turn of the twentieth century, C is the story of a boy named Serge Carrefax, whose father spends his time experimenting with wireless communication while running a school for deaf children. Serge grows up amid the noise and silence with his brilliant but troubled older sister, Sophie: an intense sibling relationship that stays with him as he heads off into an equally troubled larger world.
After a fling with a nurse at a Bohemian spa, Serge serves in World War I as a radio operator for reconnaissance planes. When his plane is shot down, Serge is taken to a German prison camp, from which he escapes. Back in London, he†™s recruited for a mission to Cairo on behalf of the shadowy Empire Wireless Chain. All of which eventually carries Serge to a fitful†”and perhaps fateful†”climax at the bottom of an Egyptian tomb . . .
Only a writer like Tom McCarthy could pull off a story with this effortless historical breadth, psychological insight, and postmodern originality.

David Mitchell mit The Thousand Autumns of Jacob de Zoet

Kurzbeschreibung
1799: Jacob de Zoet landet auf dem winzigen Eiland Deshima, dem äußersten Handelsposten der Dutch East India Company in Japan. Der junge Angestellte soll Beweise dafür finden, dass der vorherige Vorgesetzte hier Korruption betrieben hat. Während ihm seine Landsleute die kalte Schulter zeigen, gewinnt Jakob das Vertrauen des Dolmetschers und – sehr viel gefährlicher – verfällt einer seltenen Frau, einer Hebamme, der es gestattet ist, beim Arzt der Gesellschaft zu studieren. Er kann nicht vorhersehen, wie verhängnisvoll sie alle von jemanden betrogen werden, dem sie vertrauen und wie weit die Konsequenzen reichen …

Lisa Moore mit February

Kurzbeschreibung
In 1982, the oil rig Ocean Ranger sank off the coast of Newfoundland during a Valentine’s night storm. In the early hours of the next morning, all 84 men aboard died. Helen O’Mara is one of those left behind when her husband, Cal, drowns. Her story starts years after the Ranger disaster, but she is compelled to travel back to the ‚February‘ that persists in her mind, and to that moment in 1982 when, expecting a fourth child, she received the call informing her that Cal was lost at sea. A quarter of a century on, late one winter’s night, Helen is woken by another phone call. It is her wayward son John, in another time zone, on his way home. He has made a girl pregnant and he needs his mother to decide what he should do. As John grapples with what it might mean to be a father, Helen realises that she must shake off her decades of mourning in order to help. With grace and precision, and a shocking ability to render the precise details of her characters‘ physical and emotional worlds, Lisa Moore reveals the whole story to us. And just as, finally, we watch the oil rig go down, we see Helen emerging from her grief to greet a new life.

Paul Murray mit Skippy Dies

Kurzbeschreibung
Ruprecht Van Doren is an overweight genius whose hobbies include very difficult maths and the Search for Extra-Terrestrial Intelligence. Daniel ‚Skippy‘ Juster is his roommate. In the grand old Dublin institution that is Seabrook College for Boys, nobody pays either of them much attention. But when Skippy falls for Lori, the frisbee-playing Siren from the girls‘ school next door, suddenly all kinds of people take an interest – including Carl, part-time drug-dealer and official school psychopath …A tragic comedy of epic sweep and dimension, „Skippy Dies“ scours the corners of the human heart and wrings every drop of pathos, humour and hopelessness out of life, love, Robert Graves, mermaids, M-theory, and everything in between.

Rose Tremain mit Trespass

Kurzbeschreibung
Trespass is about place, space, territory… and the iron grip of the past.
Rose Tremain won the 2008 Orange Prize. Her thrilling new novel, Trespass, is a gripping story of redemption and revenge, in the sinister setting of the river gorges of the Cevennes.
Pressestimmen
„Tremain is a magnificent story-teller.“ Independent on Sunday
„Luminous talent for the fusion of the extraordinary and the commonplace.“ Sunday Telegraph
„Vivid, original and always engaging.“ The Times

Christos Tsiolkas mit The Slap

Kurzbeschreibung
The sensational international bestseller by Australia’s „preeminent contemporary novelist“ (The Age), in his United States debut
Winner of the 2009 Commonwealth Writers‘ Prize, Christos Tsiolkas’s The Slap is a riveting page-turner and a powerful, haunting rumination on contemporary middle-class family life. When a man slaps a child who is not his own at a neighborhood barbecue, the act triggers a series of repercussions in the lives of the people who witness the event-causing them to reassess their values, expectations, and desires. For readers of Jonathan Franzen and Tom Perrotta, this is a compelling account of modern society and the way we live today.

Alan Warner mit The Stars in the Bright Sky

Kurzbeschreibung
The Sopranos are back: out of school and out in the world, gathered in Gatwick to plan a super-cheap last-minute holiday to celebrate their reunion. Kay, Kylah, Manda, Rachel and Finn are joined by Finn’s equally gorgeous friend Ava – a half-French philosophy student – and are ready to go on the rampage. Just into their twenties and as wild as ever, they’ve added acrylic nails, pedicures, mobile phones and credit cards to their arsenal, but are still the same thirsty girls: their holiday bags packed with skimpy clothes and condoms, their hormones rampant. Will it be Benidorm or Magaluf, Paris or Las Vegas? One thing is certain: a great deal of fast-food will be eaten and gallons of Guinness will be drunk by the alpha-female Manda, and she will be matched by the others‘ enthusiastic intake of Bacardi Breezers, vodkas and Red Bull. With Alan Warner’s pitch-perfect ear for dialogue, pinpoint characterisation and glorious set-pieces, this is a novel propelled by conversation through scenes of excess and debauchery, hilarity and sadness. Like the six young women at its centre, „The Stars in the Bright Sky“ is vivid and brimming with life – in all its squalor, rage, tears and laughter – and presents an unforgettable story of female friendship.

Quelle: Man Booker Prize

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