Booker Prize 2009

Heute wurde die Longlist zum diesjährigen Booker Prize bekannt gegeben:

Antonia S. Byatt - The Children's Book

im Jänner 2010 erscheint eine günstigere Ausgabe

Kurzbeschreibung
Famous author Olive Wellwood writes a special private book, bound in different colours, for each of her children. In their rambling house near Romney Marsh they play in a story-book world - but their lives, and those of their rich cousins and their friends, the son and daughter of a curator at the new Victoria and Albert Museum, are already inscribed with mystery. Each family carries its own secrets. They grow up in the golden summers of Edwardian times, but as the sons rebel against their parents and the girls dream of independent futures, they are unaware that in the darkness ahead they will be betrayed unintentionally by the adults who love them. This is the children's book.

Über den Autor
A.S. Byatt is internationally acclaimed as a novelist, short story-writer and critic. Her books include Possession (winner of the Booker Prize in 1990), and the quartet of The Virgin in the Garden, Still Life, Babel Tower and A Whistling Woman. Educated at York and Newnham College, Cambridge, she taught at the Central School of Art and Design, and was Senior Lecturer in English at University College, London, before becoming a full-time writer in 1983. She was appointed CBE in 1990 and DBE in 1999.

J.M. Coetzee - Summertime

erscheint im Oktober 2009

Kurzbeschreibung
A young English biographer is working on a book about the late writer, John Coetzee. He plans to focus on the years from 1972-1977 when Coetzee, in his thirties, is sharing a run-down cottage in the suburbs of Cape Town with his widowed father. This, the biographer senses, is the period when he was 'finding his feet as a writer'. Never having met Coetzee, he embarks on a series of interviews with people who were important to him - a married woman with whom he had an affair, his favourite cousin Margot, a Brazilian dancer whose daughter had English lessons with him, former friends and colleagues. From their testimony emerges a portrait of the young Coetzee as an awkward, bookish individual with little talent for opening himself to others. Within the family he is regarded as an outsider, someone who tried to flee the tribe and has now returned, chastened. His insistence on doing manual work, his long hair and beard, rumours that he writes poetry evoke nothing but suspicion in the South Africa of the time. Sometimes heartbreaking, often very funny, "Summertime" shows us a great writer as he limbers up for his task. It completes the majestic trilogy of fictionalised memoir begun with "Boyhood" and "Youth".

Über den Autor
J.M. Coetzee, geboren 1940 in Kapstadt, stammt aus einer Afrikaaner-Familie, wurde jedoch englischsprachig erzogen. 1962 verließ er erstmals Südafrika, um bei IBM in Großbritannien als Programmierer zu arbeiten. 1965 zog er in die USA, wo er 1969 über Beckett promovierte. Er kehrte 1972 als Literaturprofessor nach Südafrika zurück. Der internationale Durchbruch gelang ihm 1980 mit "Waiting for the Barbarians". Er wurde für seine Romane mit zahlreichen Preisen ausgezeichnet, u.a. zweimal mit dem Booker Prize. 2003 erhielt Coetzee den Nobelpreis für Literatur.

Adam Foulds - The Quickening Maze

Kurzbeschreibung
Based on real events in Epping Forest on the edge of London around 1840, "The Quickening Maze" centres on the first incarceration of the great nature poet John Clare. After years struggling with alcohol, critical neglect and depression, Clare finds himself in High Beach Private Asylum - an institution run on reformist principles which would later become known as occupational therapy. At the same time another poet, the young Alfred Tennyson, moves nearby and becomes entangled in the life and catastrophic schemes of the asylum's owner, the peculiar, charismatic Dr Matthew Allen. For John Clare, a man who had grown up steeped in the freedoms and exhilarations of nature, who thought 'the edge of the world was a day's walk away', a locked door is a kind of death. This intensely lyrical novel describes his vertiginous fall, through hallucinatory episodes of insanity and dissolving identity, towards his final madness. Historically accurate, but brilliantly imagined, the closed world of High Beach and its various inmates - the doctor, his lonely daughter in love with Tennyson, the brutish staff and John Clare himself - are brought vividly to life. Outside the walls is Nature, and Clare's paradise: the birds and animals, the gypsies living in the forest; his dream of home, of redemption, of escape. Rapturous yet precise, exquisitely written, rich in character and detail, this is a remarkable and deeply affecting book: a visionary novel which contains a world.

Über den Autor
Adam Foulds was born in 1974, took a Creative Writing MA at the University of East Anglia and now lives in South London. His first novel, The Truth About These Strange Times, was published in 2007 and his book-length narrative poem, The Broken Word, the following year. He was named the Sunday Times Young Writer of the Year in 2008.

Sarah Hall - How to paint a Dead Man

günstigere Ausgabe erscheint im September

Kurzbeschreibung
Italy in the early 1960s: a dying painter considers the sacrifices and losses that have made him an enigma, both to strangers and those closest to him. He begins his last life painting, using the same objects he has painted obsessively for his entire career - a small group of bottles. In Cumbria 30 years later, a landscape artist - and admirer of the Italian recluse - finds himself trapped in the extreme terrain that has made him famous. And in present-day London, his daughter, an art curator struggling with the sudden loss of her twin brother while trying to curate an exhibition about the lives of the twentieth-century European masters, is drawn into a world of darkness and sexual abandon. Covering half a century, this is a luminous and searching novel, and Hall's most accomplished work to date.

Über den Autor
Sarah Hall was born in Cumbria in 1974 and now lives and works there. Her first novel, Haweswater, was published by Faber in 2002. Her second, The Electric Michelangelo, was shortlisted for the Man Booker Prize in 2004. In 2007 Sarah won the John Llewellyn Rhys Prize

Samantha Harvey - The Wilderness

günstigere Ausgabe erscheint im April 2010

Kurzbeschreibung
It's Jake's birthday. He is sitting in a small plane, being flown over the landscape that has been the backdrop to his life - his childhood, his marriage, his work, his passions. Now he is in his early sixties, and he isn't quite the man he used to be. He has lost his wife, his son is in prison, and he is about to lose his past. Jake has Alzheimer's. As the disease takes hold of him, Jake struggles to hold on to his personal story, to his memories and identity, but they become increasingly elusive and unreliable. What happened to his daughter? Is she alive, or long dead? And why exactly is his son in prison? What went so wrong in his life? There was a cherry tree once, and a yellow dress, but what exactly do they mean? As Jake, assisted by 'poor Eleanor', a childhood friend with whom for some unfathomable reason he seems to be sleeping, fights the inevitable dying of the light, the key events of his life keep changing as he tries to grasp them, and what until recently seemed solid fact is melting into surreal dreams or nightmarish imaginings. Is there anything he'll be able to salvage from the wreckage? Beauty, perhaps, the memory of love, or nothing at all? From the first sentence to the last, The Wilderness holds us in its grip. This is writing of extraordinary power and beauty.

Über den Autor
Samantha Harvey was born in England in 1975. She has lived in Ireland, New Zealand and Japan writing, travelling and teaching, and in recent years has co-founded an environmental charity alongside her novel writing. She completed with distinction the Bath Spa Creative Writing MA course in 2005, where she was shortlisted for the PFD prize. The Wilderness is her first novel.

James Lever - Me Cheeta

Synopsis
The incredible, and moving true story of Cheeta the Chimp, star of countless Hollywood blockbusters, told in his own words. The greatest Hollywood Tarzan, Johnny Weissmuller, died in 1984. Maureen O'Sullivan, his Jane, died in 1998. Weissmuller's son, who first played Boy in the 1939 film Tarzan finds a Mate, has gone too. But Cheeta the Chimp, who starred with them all, is alive and well, retired in Palm Springs. At the incredible age of seventy-five, he is by far the oldest living chimpanzee ever recorded. Now, in his own words, Cheeta (aka Jiggs) finally tells his extraordinary story. He was just a baby when snatched from the jungle of Liberia in 1932, by the great animal importer Henry Trefflich, who went on to supply NASA with its 'Monkeys for Space' programme. That same year, Cheeta appeared in Tarzan the Ape Man, and in 1934 Tarzan and His Mate, in which he famously stole the clothes from a naked O'Sullivan, dripping wet from an underwater swimming scene with Weissmuller. Cheeta tells it all, a life lived with the stars, a monkey stolen from deepest Africa forced to make a living in the fake jungles of Hollywood.He tells us too of his journey beyond the screen: his struggle with drink and addiction to cigars; his breakthrough with a radical new form of abstract painting, 'Apeism'; his touching relationship with his retired nightclub-performing grandson Jeeta, now a considerable artist in his own right; his fondness for hamburgers and his battle in later life with diabetes; and, through thick and thin, carer Dan Westfall, his loving companion who has helped this magnificent monkey come to terms with his peculiar past. Funny, moving, searingly honest, Cheeta transports us back to a lost Hollywood. He is a real star, and this the greatest celebrity memoir of recent times.

Über den Autor
James Lever was born in Bolton and educated in Oxford. He's 38, and spent his twenties writing an 800-page novel called 'News Sport Weather', whose subject was 'everything'. It wasn't any good, and nor was it published. He lives in London, where he has worked as a comedy-writer and performer, reviewer, ghost and editor. 'Me Cheeta' is his first novel.

Hilary Mantel - Wolf Hall

A magisterial new novel that takes us behind the scenes during one of the most formative periods in English history: the reign of Henry VIII. Wolf Hall is told mainly through the eyes of Thomas Cromwell, a self-made man who rose from a blacksmith's son in Putney to be the most powerful man in England after the king. The cast also includes Cardinal Wolsey, Thomas More, Anne Boleyn and Henry's other wives - and, of course, King Henry himself. It was a time when a half-made society was making itself with great passion and suffering and courage; a time when those involved in the art of the possible were servants to masters only interested in glorious gestures; a time when the very idea of social progress, and of a better world, was fresh, alien and threatening. It was a time of men who weren't like us, but who were creating us

Simon Mawer - The Glass Room

TB erscheint Jänner 2010

Synopsis
Cool. Balanced. Modern. The precisions of science, the wild variance of lust, the catharsis of confession and the fear of failure ? these are things that happen in the Glass Room. High on a Czechoslovak hill, the Landauer House shines as a wonder of steel and glass and onyx built specially for newlyweds Viktor and Liesel Landauer, a Jew married to a gentile. But the radiant honesty of 1930 that the house, with its unique Glass Room, seems to engender quickly tarnishes as the storm clouds of WW2 gather, and eventually the family must flee, accompanied by Viktor's lover and her child. But the house's story is far from over, and as it passes from hand to hand, from Czech to Russian, both the best and the worst of the history of Eastern Europe becomes somehow embodied and perhaps emboldened within the beautiful and austere surfaces and planes so carefully designed, until events become full-circle.

Über den Autor
Simon Mawer was born in 1948 in England, and spent his childhood there, in Cyprus and in Malta. He now lives with his wife and two children in Italy, and teaches at the English School in Rome

Ed O'Loughlin - Not Untrue & Not Unkind

Edit:
Amazon hat den Preis der verlinkten Ausgabe mittlerweile auf 20,99 € angehoben, da der alte wohl ein Versehen war. Es ist allerdings bereits eine Tradepaperbackausgabe im Penguinverlag erschienen (Link).

Synopsis
In Dublin, a newspaper editor called Cartwright is found dead. One of his colleagues, Owen Simmons, discovers a dossier on Cartwright's desk. And in the dossier Owen finds a photograph, which brings him back to a dusty road in Africa and to the woman he once loved! "Not Untrue and Not Unkind" is Owen's story - a gripping story of friendship, rivalry and betrayal amongst a group of journalists and photographers covering Africa's wars. It is an astonishingly powerful and accomplished debut that immediately establishes Ed O'Loughlin as a mature master of the novel form.

Über den Autor
Ed O'Loughlin was born in Toronto and raised in Ireland. He reported from Africa for the Irish Times and other papers, and was Middle East correspondent for the Sydney Morning Herald and The Age of Melbourne. Not Untrue and Not Unkind is his first novel.

James Scudamore - Heliopolis

günstigere Ausgabe erscheint im Februar 2010

Synopsis
Born in a Sao Paulo shantytown, Ludo undergoes a remarkable transformation. Directed by forces beyond his control, he first leaves, then returns to the vast city of his birth - but on the opposite side of its social divide. Now twenty-seven, he works for a vacuous 'communications company', marketing unwanted, unaffordable products aimed at the very underclass into which he was born. He has developed an obsessive, adulterous love for his adoptive sister, whose husband is his only friend. And he has an appetite that can never be satisfied. Welcome to the world of "Heliopolis". By turns comic, violent and poignant, it is a rags-to-riches tale like no other - the story of a man whose destiny moves him around like a chess piece, and risks taking him to the brink of madness and brutality.

Über den Autor
James Scudamore was born in 1976 and grew up in Japan, Brazil and the UK. His first novel, The Amnesia Clinic, won the 2007 Somerset Maugham Award and was shortlisted for the Costa First Novel Award and the Commonwealth Writers' Prize. He lives in London.

Colm Toibin - Brooklyn

im Mai 2010 erscheint eine unwesentlich günstigere Ausgabe

Kurzbeschreibung
Eine irische Kleinstadt in den 1950er-Jahren: Wie viele andere ihrer Generation findet auch Eilis Lacey zu Hause keine Arbeit. Als sie eine Stelle in Amerika angeboten bekommt, ist klar, dass sie ihre Heimat verlassen muss. Also nimmt Eilis Abschied von ihrer Familie und macht sich auf den Weg, um sich in Brooklyn ein neues Leben aufzubauen. Die junge Frau ist einsam und hat Heimweh, doch mit der Zeit gelingt es ihr, den Schmerz zu verarbeiten. Dabei hilft ihr der neue Alltag: Tagsüber arbeitet sie an der Kasse eines großen Kaufhauses, abends besucht sie Kurse am Brooklyn College und den Freitagabend verbringt sie auf der Tanzfläche des Gemeindesaals. Irgendwann stellt Eilis fest, dass sie auf eine gewisse Art ihr Glück gefunden hat. Doch dann kommen schlimme Nachrichten und sie muss zurück nach Irland. Als sich dort plötzlich ganz neue Möglichkeiten eröffnen, steht Eilis vor einer schweren Entscheidung. Sie muss eine Wahl treffen: zwischen Glück und Liebe in dem Land, in das sie gehört, und den Versprechen, die sie auf der anderen Seite des Ozeans halten muss.
'Brooklyn' ist eine warmherzige Geschichte über große Liebe und schwere Verluste und über die schwere Wahl zwischen Pflicht und persönlicher Freiheit. Mit Eilis Lacey hat Colm Tóibín eine außergewöhnliche Heldin geschaffen und mit 'Brooklyn' einen Roman von ungeheurer emotionaler Wucht.

Über den Autor
Colm Toibin, 1955 in Irland geboren, wurde für seine Bücher mit zahlreichen Preisen ausgezeichnet.

William Trevor - Love and Summer

erscheint im August

Kurzbeschreibung
Es ist Sommer in Rathmoye und bei der Beerdigung von Mrs Connulty taucht ein Fremder auf. Ein paar Meilen weiter lebt ein Farmer, der sich für den Tod seiner ersten Frau und des Kindes verantwortlich fühlt, mit seiner neuen jungen Ehefrau. Der Fremde und die junge Frau begegnen sich und können sich einander nicht entziehen.

Über den Autor
William Trevor, geboren 1928, verbrachte seine Kindheit im ländlichen Irland. Er besuchte das Trinity College in Dublin und ist Mitglied der Irish Academy of Letters. Sein umfangreiches Werk umfasst Romane und Erzählungen und wurde mit zahlreichen literarischen Preisen ausgezeichnet. So erhielt er 1999 den "David Cohen British Literature Prize" für sein Gesamtwerk und 2008 den "Bob Hughes Lifetime Award". William Trevor lebt heute in Devon/England.

Sarah Waters - The Little Stranger

im April 2010 erscheint eine günstigere Ausgabe

Synopsis
After her award-winning trilogy of Victorian novels, Sarah Waters turned to the 1940s and wrote THE NIGHT WATCH, a tender and tragic novel set against the backdrop of wartime Britain. Shortlisted for both the Orange and the Man Booker, it went straight to number one in the bestseller chart. In a dusty post-war summer in rural Warwickshire, a doctor is called to a patient at Hundreds Hall. Home to the Ayres family for over two centuries, the Georgian house, once grand and handsome, is now in decline, its masonry crumbling, its gardens choked with weeds, the clock in its stable yard permanently fixed at twenty to nine. But are the Ayreses haunted by something more sinister than a dying way of life? Little does Dr Faraday know how closely, and how terrifyingly, their story is about to become entwined with his. Prepare yourself. From this wonderful writer who continues to astonish us, now comes a chilling ghost story.

Über den Autor
Sarah Waters wurde 1966 in Wales geboren. Sie hat in englischer Literatur promoviert und zahlreiche Artikel in Kultur- und Literaturzeitschriften veröffentlicht. 1998 erhielt sie den New London Writers Award des London Arts Board. Buchveröffentlichungen, Auszeichnung mit dem Times Young Novelist of the Year Award und den Somerset Maugham Award.