Booker Prize 2012

    Bring Up the Bodies - Hilary Mantel


    Die ist die Fortsetzung zu "Wölfe", bisher nocch nicht in deutscher Sprache erschienen.


    Kurzbeschreibung
    The sequel to the Man Booker-winning Wolf Hall. 'My boy Thomas, give him a dirty look and he'll gouge your eye out. Trip him, and he'll cut off your leg,' says Walter Cromwell in the year 1500. 'But if you don't cut across him he's a very gentleman. And he'll stand anyone a drink.' By 1535 Thomas Cromwell, the blacksmith's son, is far from his humble origins. Chief Minister to Henry VIII, his fortunes have risen with those of Anne Boleyn, Henry's second wife, for whose sake Henry has broken with Rome and created his own church. But Henry's actions have forced England into dangerous isolation, and Anne has failed to do what she promised: bear a son to secure the Tudor line. When Henry visits Wolf Hall, Cromwell watches as Henry falls in love with the silent, plain Jane Seymour. The minister sees what is at stake: not just the king's pleasure, but the safety of the nation. As he eases a way through the sexual politics of the court, its miasma of gossip, he must negotiate a 'truth' that will satisfy Henry and secure his own career. But neither minister nor king will emerge undamaged from the bloody theatre of Anne's final days. In 'Bring up the Bodies', sequel to the Man Booker Prize-winning 'Wolf Hall', Hilary Mantel explores one of the most mystifying and frightening episodes in English history: the destruction of Anne Boleyn. This new novel is a speaking picture, an audacious vision of Tudor England that sheds its light on the modern world. It is the work of one of our great writers at the height of her powers.
    Mehr anzeigen
    Weniger anzeigen

    Philida - André Brink


    Philida erscheint in englischer Sprache im Herbst 2012, ob eine deutsche Übersetzung geplant ist, weiß ich nicht.


    Kurzbeschreibung
    Soon there must come a day when I can say for myself: This and that I shall do, this and that I shall not. Philida is the mother of four children by Francois Brink, the son of her master. The year is 1832 and the Cape is rife with rumours about the liberation of the slaves. Philida decides to risk her whole life by lodging a complaint against Francois, who has reneged on his promise to set her free. His father has ordered him to marry a white woman from a prominent Cape Town family, and Philida will be sold on to owners in the harsh country up north. Unwilling to accept this fate, Philida continues to test the limits of her freedom, and with the Muslim slave Labyn she sets off on a journey across the great wilderness on the banks of the Gariep River, to the far north of Cape Town. "Philida" is an unforgettable story of one woman's determination to survive and be free.

    The Garden of Evening Mists - Tan Twang Eng


    Ob eine deutsche Übersetzung geplant ist, weiß ich nicht.


    Kurzbeschreibung
    It's Malaya, 1949. After studying law at Cambrige and time spent helping to prosecute Japanese war criminals, Yun Ling Teoh, herself the scarred lone survivor of a brutal Japanese wartime camp, seeks solace among the jungle fringed plantations of Northern Malaya where she grew up as a child. There she discovers Yugiri, the only Japanese garden in Malaya, and its owner and creator, the enigmatic Aritomo, exiled former gardener of the Emperor of Japan. Despite her hatred of the Japanese, Yun Ling seeks to engage Aritomo to create a garden in Kuala Lumpur, in memory of her sister who died in the camp. Aritomo refuses, but agrees to accept Yun Ling as his apprentice 'until the monsoon comes'. Then she can design a garden for herself. As the months pass, Yun Ling finds herself intimately drawn to her sensei and his art while, outside the garden, the threat of murder and kidnapping from the guerrillas of the jungle hinterland increases with each passing day. But the Garden of Evening Mists is also a place of mystery. Who is Aritomo and how did he come to leave Japan? Why is it that Yun Ling's friend and host Magnus Praetorius, seems to almost immune from the depredations of the Communists? What is the legend of 'Yamashita's Gold' and does it have any basis in fact? And is the real story of how Yun Ling managed to survive the war perhaps the darkest secret of all?

    Die unwahrscheinliche Pilgerreise des Harold Fry - Rachel Joyce


    Kurzbeschreibung
    Eigentlich wollte er nur zum Briefkasten. Dann geht er 1000 Kilometer zu Fuß.
    Der unvergessliche Roman aus England, der die ganze Welt erobert.


    »Ich bin auf dem Weg. Du musst nur durchhalten. Ich werde dich retten, du wirst schon sehen. Ich werde laufen, und du wirst leben.«
    Harold Fry will nur kurz einen Brief einwerfen an seine frühere Kollegin Queenie Hennessy, die im Sterben liegt. Doch dann läuft er am Briefkasten vorbei und auch am Postamt, aus der Stadt hinaus und immer weiter, 87 Tage, 1000 Kilometer. Zu Fuß von Südengland bis an die schottische Grenze zu Queenies Hospiz. Eine Reise, die er jeden Tag neu beginnen muss. Für Queenie. Für seine Frau Maureen. Für seinen Sohn David. Für sich selbst. Und für uns alle.


    Ein ganz außergewöhnlicher und tief berührender Roman – über Geheimnisse, besondere Momente und zufällige Begegnungen, die uns von Grund auf verändern. Über Tapferkeit und Betrug, Liebe und Loyalität und ein ganz unscheinbares Paar Segelschuhe.

    Communion Town - Sam Thompson


    Ob eine deutsche Übersetzung geplant ist, weiß ich nicht.


    Kurzbeschreibung'Have you noticed how each of us conjures up our own city?' Every city is made of stories: stories that meet and diverge, stories of the commonplace and the strange, of love and crime, of ghosts and monsters. Reminiscent of David Mitchell's GHOSTWRITTEN and Italo Calvino's INVISIBLE CITIES, this is the story of a place that never looks the same way twice: a place imagined anew by each citizen who walks through the changing streets among voices half-heard, signs half-glimpsed and desires half-acknowledged. This is the story of a city.

    Willkommen auf Skios - Michael Frayn


    Kurzbeschreibung
    Eine schwindelerregende Verwechslungskomödie: Auf einer Ferieninsel in Griechenland bereiten sich die Gäste einer amerikanischen Stiftung auf die Ankunft des diesjährigen Gastredners vor. Dr. Norman Wilfred, Autorität auf dem Gebiet der Szientometrie, erweist sich als erstaunlich jung und gutaussehend und ist alles andere als ein verknöcherter Gelehrter. Das findet insbesondere Nikki, die attraktive rechte Hand von Mrs. Toppler, der Mäzenin. Als Nikkis leichtsinnige Freundin Georgie auf einem anderen Teil der Insel auf einen kahlen, missmutigen und orientierungslosen Mann namens Dr. Norman Wilfred trifft, bricht der nackte Wahnsinn aus.

    The Lighthouse - Alison Moore


    Ob eine deutsche Übersetzung geplant ist, weiß ich nicht.



    Kurzbeschreibung
    Longlisted for the Man Booker Prize 2012The Lighthouse begins on a North Sea ferry, on whose blustery outer deck stands Futh, a middle-aged, recently separated man heading to Germany for a restorative walking holiday.Spending his first night in Hellhaus at a small, family-run hotel, he finds the landlady hospitable but is troubled by an encounter with an inexplicably hostile barman.In the morning, Futh puts the episode behind him and sets out on his week-long circular walk along the Rhine. As he travels, he contemplates his childhood; a complicated friendship with the son of a lonely neighbour; his parents’ broken marriage and his own. But the story he keeps coming back to, the person and the event affecting all others, is his mother and her abandonment of him as a boy, which left him with a void to fill, a substitute to find.He recalls his first trip to Germany with his newly single father. He is mindful of something he neglected to do there, an omission which threatens to have devastating repercussions for him this time around.At the end of the week, Futh, sunburnt and blistered, comes to the end of his circular walk, returning to what he sees as the sanctuary of the Hellhaus hotel, unaware of the events which have been unfolding there in his absence.

    The Yips - Nicola Barker


    Ob eine deutsche Übersetzung geplant ist, weiß ich nicht.


    Kurzbeschreibung
    The hilarious new novel from the Booker-shortlisted author of DARKMANS, Nicola Barker. 2006 is a foreign country; they do things differently there. Tiger Woods' reputation is entirely untarnished and the English Defence League does not exist yet. Storm-clouds of a different kind are gathering above the bar of Luton's less than exclusive Thistle Hotel. Among those caught up in the unfolding drama are a man who's had cancer seven times, a woman priest with an unruly fringe, the troubled family of a notorious local fascist, an interfering barmaid with three E's at A-level but a PhD in bullshit, a free-thinking Muslim sex therapist and his considerably more pious wife. But at the heart of every intrigue and the bottom of every mystery is the repugnantly charismatic Stuart Ransom - a golfer in free-fall. Nicola Barker's THE YIPS is at once a historical novel of the pre-Twitter moment, the filthiest state-of-the-nation novel since Martin Amis' MONEY and the most flamboyant piece of comic fiction ever to be set in Luton.

    Narcopolis - Jeet Thayil


    Ob eine deutsche Übersetzung geplant ist, weiß ich nicht.


    Kurzbeschreibung
    The internationally acclaimed novel of Bombay's sprawling underworld

    Written in poetic and affecting prose, Jeet Thayil's luminous debut novel charts the evolution of a great and broken metropolis across three decades. A rich, hallucinatory dream that captures Bombay in all its compelling squalor, Narcopolis completely subverts and challenges the literary traditions for which the Indian novel is celebrated. It is a book about drugs, sex, death, perversion, addiction, love, and God and has more in common in its subject matter with the work of William S. Burroughs or Baudelaire than with that of the subcontinent's familiar literary lights. Above all, it is a fantastical portrait of a beautiful and damned generation in a nation about to sell its soul.

    Swimming Home - Deborah Levy


    Ob eine deutsche Übersetzung geplant ist, weiß ich nicht.


    Kurzbeschreibung
    Swimming Home is a subversive page-turner, a merciless gaze at the insidious harm that depression can have on apparently stable, well-turned-out people. Set in a summer villa, the story is tautly structured, taking place over a single week in which a group of beautiful, flawed tourists in the French Riviera come loose at the seams.

    The Teleportation Accident - Ned Beauman


    Ob eine deutsche Übersetzung geplant ist, weiß ich nicht.


    Kurzbeschreibung
    In the declining Weimar Republic, Egon Loeser works as a stage designer for New Expressionist theatre. His hero is the greatest set designer of the seventeenth century, Adriano Lavicini, who devised the so-called Teleportation Device for the whisking of actors from one scene to another—a miracle, until the thing malfunctioned, causing numerous deaths and perhaps summoning the devil himself.


    Apolitical in a dangerous time, sex-driven in a dry spell, Loeser leaves the tired scene in Berlin in pursuit of the lubricious Adele Hitler (no relation), who couldn’t care less about him. Heading first to Paris and then to Los Angeles, he finds his entire tired Berlin social circle reconstituted in exile, under the patronage of a crime writer and his possibly philandering wife. He also finds himself uncomfortably close to a string of murders at Caltech, where a physicist, assisted by Adele herself, is trying to develop a device for honest-to-God teleportation.


    Following his breathtaking debut, Boxer, Beetle, Ned Beauman ups the ante, creating in The Teleportation Accident a marvelous mash-up of historical fiction, L.A. noir, science fiction, and satire, and proving himself a star on the rise.

    Umbrella - Will Self


    Ob eine deutsche Übersetzung geplant ist, weiß ich nicht.


    Kurzbeschreibung
    A brother is as easily forgotten as an umbrella. James Joyce, Ulysses Recently having abandoned his RD Laing-influenced experiment in running a therapeutic community - the so-called Concept House in Willesden - maverick psychiatrist Zack Busner arrives at Friern Hospital, a vast Victorian mental asylum in North London, under a professional and a marital cloud. He has every intention of avoiding controversy, but then he encounters Audrey Dearth, a working-class girl from Fulham born in 1890 who has been immured in Friern for decades. A socialist, a feminist and a munitions worker at the Woolwich Arsenal, Audrey fell victim to the encephalitis lethargica sleeping sickness epidemic at the end of the First World War and, like one of the subjects in Oliver Sacks' Awakenings, has been in a coma ever since. Realising that Audrey is just one of a number of post-encephalitics scattered throughout the asylum, Busner becomes involved in an attempt to bring them back to life - with wholly unforeseen consequences. Is Audrey's diseased brain in its nightmarish compulsion a microcosm of the technological revolutions of the twentieth century? And if Audrey is ill at all - perhaps her illness is only modernity itself? And what of Audrey's two brothers, Stanley and Albert: at the time she fell ill, Stanley was missing presumed dead on the Western Front, while Albert was in charge of the Arsenal itself, a coming man in the Imperial Civil Service. Now, fifty years later, when Audrey awakes from her pathological swoon, which of the two is it who remains alive? Radical in its conception, uncompromising in its style, Umbrella is Will Self's most extravagant and imaginative exercise in speculative fiction to date.