With just three weeks to go, UK betting odds put C by Tom McCarthy as the leading contender for the Booker prize (the top title in terms of sales is Room by Emma Donoghue; it’s number 2 in betting by a slight margin over Damon Galgut’s In a Strange Room, which won’t be published here until 11/2, after the prize is announced).

After getting the cold shoulder from Michiko Kakutani in the daily NY Times, (“disappointing and highly self-conscious”), it has fared much better with critics in other papers, including The Washington Post, the Los Angeles Times (“An avant-garde masterpiece”) and the Sunday NYT Book Review (a “strange, original book”) and now gets an A- in the new issue of Entertainment Weekly,

The protagonist of Tom McCarthy’s experimental new work is named Serge, which is appropriate for a book so crackling with all things electric. Serge’s life — and his obsessions with telegraphy and Morse code — reads like W. Somerset Maugham tweaked to a frenetic and distorted frequency…

C Tom McCarthy Retail Price: $25.95 Hardcover: 320 pages Publisher: Knopf – (2010-09-07) ISBN / EAN: 0307593339 / 9780307593337

Tantor Audio; UNABR; Narrated by Stephen Hoye

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