Donaghue’s ROOM on Booker Short List
The announcement of the Booker Short List was somewhat delayed by the transit strike in London today. The following are the six titles, by current Amazon sales rankings in the U.S. (The Guardian features a slide show with a description and the British publishing history of each title. Warning: those are the British covers):
#422 Room, Emma Donoghue, (Little, Brown, 9/13) — coming out next week, Room has received advance buzz and comparisons to The Lovely Bones.
#3,931 C, Tom McCarthy’s, (Knopf 9/07) — just received a decidedly not positive review from Michiko Kakutani, NYT.
# 21,332 Parrot and Olivier in America, Peter Carey, (Knopf; 4/20) — if Carey wins, this would be his third Booker. The book reached a high of #422 on Amazon after it was released.
# 37,883 The Long Song, Andrea Levy, (FSG, 4/27) — reached a high of #9,642 — Jamaican-British author Andrea Levy also wrote Small Island, which was made into two-part series that appeared on PBS Materpiece Theater this Spring. Set in Jamaica in the 19th C, The Long Song is narrated by July, a house slave on a sugar plantation.
Not available in the U.S (UPDATE: These titles are now forthcoming)
The Finkler Question by Howard Jacobson
In a Strange Room by Damon Galgut
Not making the cut from the Booker long list is Skippy Dies, by Paul Murray (Faber & Faber) just released here to strong reviews. It has the highest U.S. Amazon ranking of the all the longlist titles at #134 and is currently being adapted as a film.
Also not on the list is the best-selling title in the UK (but at a lowly #11,993 on Amazon rankings here), The Slap by Christos Tsiolkas, was published as an original trade paperback here by Penguin (4-27). The Australian author has made waves by calling European writers “dry and academic” as compared to Americans. The London Evening Standard called it a Slap in the Face for Popular Read.