THE SISTERS BROTHERS On Booker Short List
Librarian favorite Patrick deWitt’s The Sisters Brothers is one of the six books on the shortlist for the Booker Prize, announced this morning in London. In reporting on the selections, The Guardian calls it, “a darkly comic wild west odyssey of two cowboy assassins,” and “the strongest wild card on the list,” but manages to insult both U.S. and Canadian authors by saying, “American novels are, controversially, excluded from the Booker – deWitt is Canadian – but juries have a weakness for their grand, sometimes lurid, horizons.” DeWitt currently lives in the grand, but hardly lurid, Oregon.
The judges celebrated the fact that four of the titles on the list are published by smaller independent U.K. houses; that is not true in the U.S., where three are from divisions of Random House, one is from HarperCollins, one from Houghton Mifflin Harcourt and one does not yet have a U.S. publisher.
The winner of the £50,000 prize will be announced on Oct. 18.
 |
|
Audio, Dreamscape; Large Print released in Aug. by Thorndike.
Below are the other five titles on the list, with U.S. publication information:
 |
|
The Sense of an Ending is considered the favorite. It is scheduled to appear in the U.S. three months after the award is announced.
……………………..
 |
|
The Guardian reporter notes, “I’m still carrying my torch for Carol Birch’s Jamrach’s Menagerie; she’s an underrated author with an impressive backlist, and this tale of 19th-century naturalism and danger at sea is in some ways classic Booker material. She brings a freshness and vibrancy to the historical novel that is a pleasure to behold.” Few of Birch’s eleven novels have been published in the U.S. The Washington Post‘s Ron Charles says that is unfortunate, since the glimpse we get from this one is of an accomplished author. He calls the book, “a moving, fantastically exciting sea tale that takes you back to those great 19th-century stories that first convinced you ‘there is no frigate like a book.’ ”
……………………..
 |
|
The Guardian points out that Pigeon English is the most currently relevant of the titles; “narrated by an 11-year-old Ghanaian immigrant on a south London estate, [it] brings a comic tone (and an ill-advised talking pigeon) to its child’s-eye view of gang violence. The recent riots give it added bite.” It was reviewed warmly in most of the prepub review media, but got scant attention from the consumer press here, with a review in the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel, followed by another in the Cleveland Plain Dealer after the longlist announcement. It fared much better with reviewers in the U.K. Rights have been sold to Ridley Scott to develop it into a BBC TV movie.
……………………..
 |
|
This debut is compared by the publisher to The Talented Mr. Ripley and Gorky Park. The Boston Globe reviewer sniffed, “If that comparison is apt, I won’t bother reading the former and the latter isn’t as good a book as I remember. Snowdrops has its strengths. But in spite of a compelling narrative voice, the book has no emotional core. In precisely the parts where it’s supposed to be most wrenching, there’s nothing.”
……………………..
Esi Edugyan, Half Blood Blues, (Serpents Tail), has not yet been published in the U.S. The Guardian ‘s reporter dismissed it, saying, “I’m surprised to see the other Canadian on the shortlist, Esi Edugyan; our reviewer thought Half Blood Blues, the story of a black jazz musician in Nazi Germany, fascinating material but a missed opportunity.” But Jonathan Ruppin from the independent book chain Foyles said it would be a particularly deserving winner.
Another librarian favorite, Alan Hollinghurst’s The Stranger’s Child, (Knopf, 10/11/11; RH Audio) was dropped from the list. Once regarded as the top runner to win the award, The Guardian says of its elimination, “We knew from the longlist that this was a Booker keen on surprises, but with the shortlist omission of Alan Hollinghurst the judges have sprung their biggest surprise yet.”
 |
|
Also considered a notable absence from the shortlist, is Sebastian Barry’s On Canaan’s Side, (Viking, 9/8/11; Large Print, Thorndike, Dec., ISBN 9781410443465; Blackstone Audio), is coming out here this week. The Minneapolis Star Tribune calls it “a wonderful introduction” to this important Irish writer’s work. (This is a good opportunity to bring more attention to the books on the longlist through a display; a list of all the titles, with U.S. publishing information, is available here).
 |
|