Man Booker Prize 2020

Heute wurde die Longlist für den diesjährigen Booker bekannt gegeben. Am 15. September kommt dann die Shortlist.

Auf der Longlist finden sich die folgenden Bücher:

Diane Cook - The New Wilderness

Bea's five-year-old daughter, Agnes, is slowly wasting away. The smog and pollution of the overdeveloped, overpopulated metropolis they call home is ravaging her lungs. Bea knows she cannot stay in the City, but there is only one alternative: The Wilderness State. Mankind has never been allowed to venture into this vast expanse of untamed land. Until now.

Bea and Agnes join eighteen other volunteers who agree to take part in a radical experiment. They must slowly learn how to live in the unpredictable, often dangerous Wilderness, leaving no trace on their surroundings in their quest to survive. But as Agnes embraces this new existence, Bea realises that saving her daughter's life might mean losing her in ways she hadn't foreseen.

ASIN/ISBN: 0062333135

Tsitsi Dangarembga - This Mournable Body

Anxious about her prospects after leaving a stagnant job, Tambudzai finds herself living in a run-down youth hostel in downtown Harare. For reasons that include her grim financial prospects and her age, she moves to a widow's boarding house and eventually finds work as a biology teacher. But at every turn in her attempt to make a life for herself, she is faced with a fresh humiliation, until the painful contrast between the future she imagined and her daily reality ultimately drives her to a breaking point.

ASIN/ISBN: 1555978126

Avni Doshi - Burnt Suga

In her youth, Tara was wild. She abandoned her loveless marriage to join an ashram, endured a brief stint as a beggar (mostly to spite her affluent parents), and spent years chasing after a dishevelled, homeless 'artist' - all with her young child in tow. Now she is forgetting things, mixing up her maid's wages and leaving the gas on all night, and her grown-up daughter is faced with the task of caring for a woman who never cared for her.

This is a love story and a story about betrayal. But not between lovers - between mother and daughter. Sharp as a blade and laced with caustic wit, Burnt Sugar unpicks the slippery cords of memory and myth that bind two women together, and hold them apart.

ASIN/ISBN: 024144151X

Gabriel Krauze - Who They Was

This life is like being in an ocean. Some people keep swimming towards the bottom. Some people touch the bottom with one foot, or even both, and then push themselves off it to get back up to the top, where you can breathe. Others get to the bottom and decide they want to stay there. I don't want to get to the bottom because I'm already drowning.

This is a story of a London you won't find in any guidebooks.

This is a story about what it's like to exist in the moment, about boys too eager to become men, growing up in the hidden war zones of big cities - and the girls trying to make it their own way.

This is a story of reputations made and lost, of violence and vengeance - and never counting the cost.

This is a story of concrete towers and blank eyed windows, of endless nights in police stations and prison cells, of brotherhood and betrayal.

This is about the boredom, the rush, the despair, the fear and the hope.

This is about what's left behind.

ASIN/ISBN: 0008375003

Hilary Mantel - Spiegel und Licht

England, Mai 1536. Anne Boleyn ist tot, innerhalb eines Herzschlags von einem angeheuerten Henker aus Frankreich geköpft. Während ihre sterblichen Überreste dem Vergessen anheimgegeben werden, frühstückt Thomas Cromwell mit den Siegern. Der Sohn des Schmieds aus Putney taucht aus dem Blutbad des vergangenen Frühlings auf, um seinen Aufstieg zu Macht und Reichtum fortzusetzen. Zur selben Zeit gibt sich sein furchterregender Gebieter Heinrich VIII dem kurzlebigen Glück mit seiner dritten Königin hin, die schon bald bei der Geburt des lang ersehnten männlichen Thronfolgers sterben wird.

Cromwell kann sich nur auf seinen Verstand verlassen, da er weder eine starke Familie noch eine private Armee hinter sich hat. Obwohl in England rebelliert wird, im Ausland Verräter die Köpfe zusammenstecken und Heinrichs Regime eine alles belastende Invasion droht, sieht der scharfsinnige und weitsichtige Cromwell bereits ein neues England im Spiegel der Zukunft. Doch kann eine Nation oder eine Einzelperson ihre Vergangenheit abwerfen wie eine Schlange ihre Haut? Steigen die Toten unaufhörlich aus ihren Gräbern? Was werden Sie tun, fragt der spanische Botschafter Cromwell, wenn sich der König gegen Sie wendet, da er sich unweigerlich über kurz oder lang gegen jeden seiner Vertrauten wenden wird?

ASIN/ISBN: 3832197249

Colum McCann - Apeirogon

Rami Elhanan und Bassam Aramin sind zwei Männer. Rami braucht fünfzehn Minuten für die Fahrt auf die West Bank. Bassam braucht für dieselbe Strecke anderthalb Stunden. Ramis Nummernschild ist gelb, Bassams grün.

Beide Männer sind Väter von Töchtern. Beide Töchter waren Zeichen erfüllter Liebe, bevor sie starben. Ramis Tochter wurde 1997 im Alter von dreizehn Jahren von einem palästinensischen Selbstmordbomber vor einem Jerusalemer Buchladen getötet. Bassams Tochter starb 2007 zehnjährig mit einer Zuckerkette in der Tasche vor ihrer Schule durch die Kugel eines israelischen Grenzpolizisten.

Ramis und Bassams Leben ist vollkommen symmetrisch. Ramis und Bassams Leben ist vollkommen asymmetrisch. Rami und Bassam sind Freunde.

Apeirogon: eine zweidimensionale geometrische Form mit einer gegen unendlich gehenden Zahl von Seiten. Während "Apeirogon" nach und nach seine nahezu unendlichen Seiten auffächert und die beiden Männer in seiner Mitte rahmt, entfaltet sich der Palästinakonflikt in seiner ganzen Historie und Komplexität

ASIN/ISBN: 3498045334

Maaza Mengiste - The Shadow King

ETHIOPIA. 1935.

With the threat of Mussolini's army looming, recently orphaned Hirut struggles to adapt to her new life as a maid. Her new employer, Kidane, an officer in Emperor Haile Selassie's army, rushes to mobilise his strongest men before the Italians invade.

Hirut and the other women long to do more than care for the wounded and bury the dead. When Emperor Haile Selassie goes into exile and Ethiopia quickly loses hope, it is Hirut who offers a plan to maintain morale. She helps disguise a gentle peasant as the emperor and soon becomes his guard, inspiring other women to take up arms. But how could she have predicted her own personal war, still to come, as a prisoner of one of Italy's most vicious officers?

The Shadow King is a gorgeously crafted and unputdownable exploration of female power, and what it means to be a woman at war.

ASIN/ISBN: 1838851399

Kiley Reid - Such a Fun Age

When Emira is apprehended at a supermarket for 'kidnapping' the white child she's actually babysitting, it sets off an explosive chain of events. Her employer Alix, a feminist blogger with the best of intentions, resolves to make things right.

But Emira herself is aimless, broke and wary of Alix's desire to help. When a surprising connection emerges between the two women, it sends them on a crash course that will upend everything they think they know - about themselves, each other, and the messy dynamics of privilege.

ASIN/ISBN: 1526612151

Brandon Taylor - Real Life

Almost everything about Wallace is at odds with the Midwestern university town where he is working uneasily toward a biochem degree. An introverted young man from Alabama, black and queer, he has left behind his family without escaping the long shadows of his childhood. For reasons of self-preservation, Wallace has enforced a wary distance even within his own circle of friends--some dating each other, some dating women, some feigning straightness. But over the course of a late-summer weekend, a series of confrontations with colleagues, and an unexpected encounter with an ostensibly straight, white classmate, conspire to fracture his defenses while exposing long-hidden currents of hostility and desire within their community.

ASIN/ISBN: 1911547747

Anne Tyler - Der Sinn des Ganzen

Micah Mortimer liebt Gewohnheiten, Selbstgespräche und eine ordentliche Wohnung. Jeden Tag beginnt er mit einem Morgenlauf um 7.15 Uhr, duscht, frühstückt und widmet sich anschließend geduldig den Computerproblemen seiner Kunden aus der Nachbarschaft. Nachmittags ist er im Nebenjob Hausmeister und kümmert sich um das Mietshaus, in dem er wohnt; ein paar Abende die Woche verbringt er auf der Couch seiner unkomplizierten Freundin Cass. Doch dann droht Cass die Wohnungskündigung, und sie möchte bei ihm einziehen. Und ein Teenager taucht auf, der behauptet, sein Sohn zu sein.

ASIN/ISBN: 3036958207

Douglas Stuart - Shuggie Bain

It is 1981. Glasgow is dying and good families must grift to survive. Agnes Bain has always expected more from life. She dreams of greater things: a house with its own front door and a life bought and paid for outright (like her perfect, but false, teeth). But Agnes is abandoned by her philandering husband, and soon she and her three children find themselves trapped in a decimated mining town. As she descends deeper into drink, the children try their best to save her, yet one by one they must abandon her to save themselves. It is her son Shuggie who holds out hope the longest.

Shuggie is different. Fastidious and fussy, he shares his mother's sense of snobbish propriety. The miners' children pick on him and adults condemn him as no' right. But Shuggie believes that if he tries his hardest, he can be normal like the other boys and help his mother escape this hopeless place.

ASIN/ISBN: 1529019273

Sophie Ward - Love and Other Thought Experiments

Rachel and Eliza are planning their future together. One night in bed Rachel wakes up terrified and tells Eliza that an ant has crawled into her eye and is stuck there. Rachel is certain; Eliza, a scientist, is sceptical. Suddenly their entire relationship is called into question. What follows is a uniquely imaginitive sequence of interlinked stories ranging across time, place and perspective to form a sparkling philosophical tale of love, lost and found across the universe.

ASIN/ISBN: 1472154606

C Pam Zhang - How Much of These Hills is Gold

An electric debut novel set against the twilight of the American gold rush, two siblings are on the run in an unforgiving landscape—trying not just to survive but to find a home.

Ba dies in the night; Ma is already gone. Newly orphaned children of immigrants, Lucy and Sam are suddenly alone in a land that refutes their existence. Fleeing the threats of their western mining town, they set off to bury their father in the only way that will set them free from their past. Along the way, they encounter giant buffalo bones, tiger paw prints, and the specters of a ravaged landscape as well as family secrets, sibling rivalry, and glimpses of a different kind of future.

ASIN/ISBN: 0593189299