Your next read
You can search the web and find any number of book lists of this year's acclaimed titles. If you want to know what to read next, look no farther than the long and short lists for The Man Booker Prize for Fiction. Last year's winning novel, "The Narrow Road to the Deep North" by Richard Flanagan, has sold 300,000 copies in the U.K. and almost 800,000 worldwide. I highly recommend it.
Any novel or collection of short stories, originally written in English and published in the U.K. in that particular year, is eligible to receive the Booker Prize, regardless of the nationality of their author. It might seem like a limited cross section of literature; however, that does not mean you should write the winners and nominees off your reading list. In actuality, the long and short lists are often both diverse in genre and authors' nationality.
I had no idea, until I started looking at the winners from past years, that Yann Martel's celebrated novel, "Life of Pi," won in 2002. We read novels, short stories and poems such as "Pi", often not knowing how that particular work came to be in that bookstore, on that library shelf or part of our college course's reading requirement list. It is always remarkable to think that there are as many stories about the works themselves as the plots that lie within their pages.
There is a story behind that book you love so much. Perhaps The New York Times lists an author's manuscript as one of their bestsellers, and you decide to buy it, or an unknown author wins The Paris Literary Prize and sells countless copies of their novella. It could also be the case that a professor at a small university wins a regional award, and after months of revisions and emails back and forth with an editor, they land a book deal with a publishing house.
And somehow you come across the novel, you read it, never fully realizing the long journey marked by its author's uncertainties and his hopes, before it ' in due time ' reaches you.
The books that end up on the shortlist for The Man Booker Prize don't necessarily all have such arduous beginnings. Many of these novels and collections of short stories are the result of an author now publishing a book every two years or so, and the novel is oftentimes the fourth or fifth they have written. Still, these works are arguably just as important as the works we're reading for our classes.
The short list this year is as follows:
Author (Nationality) Title
Marlon James (Jamaica) "A Brief History of Seven Killings"
Tom McCarthy (U.K.) "Satin Island"
Chigozie Obioma (Nigeria) "The Fishermen"
Sunjeev Sahota (U.K.) "Year of the Runaways"
Anne Tyler (U.S.) "A Spool of Blue Thread"
Hanya Yanagihara (U.S.) "A Little Life"
It is important to note that there is a great deal of controversy in the literature world over the short list being a cross-section of 'the year's best fiction.' Every individual is different; we all have unique tastes in literature and style of writing we prefer to read. It's no different here. This is only one of countless awards that highlight works of great novelists.
The Man Booker Prize winner will be announced on Tuesday, Oct. 13, 2015.
You can find more information about the judges and the book lists for this year's nominees here: