Richard Flanagan has won the Man Booker Award for his sixth novel, The Narrow Road to the Deep North, (RH/Knopf; Blackstone Audio), described  by the judges as a “magnificent novel of love and war.” He was featured in August on NPR’s Weekend Edition Sunday.

Seattle librarian David Wright praised it last month in the Seattle Times. In the Washington Post, critic Ron Charles reacted strongly to it, warning readers that it can, “cast a shadow over your summer and draw you away from friends and family into dark contemplation the way only the most extraordinary books can. Nothing since Cormac McCarthy’s The Road has shaken me like this — all the more so because it’s based on recorded history, rather than apocalyptic speculation.”

In the daily New York Times, however, Michiko Kakutani called it “adeeply flawed,” but appreciated Flanagan’s ability to “communicate both the abominations that men are capable of inflicting upon one another, and the resilience many display in the face of utter misery.”

Read a sample here, via OverDrive; audio sample here.

Flanagan is Australian. This was the first year that the Awards were opened to Americans. Four were on the longlist and two made the transition to the shortlist of six; Joshua Ferris, To Rise Again at a Decent Hour,  Hachette/Little,Brown) and Karen Joy Fowler, We Are All Completely Beside Ourselves, (Penguin/Putnam/Marian Wood).

Historically, Booker winners have gone on to become best sellers in the U.S. UPDATE: The Narrow Road to the Deep North, rose to #16 on Amazon’s sales rankings the day after the announcement.

The Nobel Peace Prize this year goes to two people, Malala Yousafzai, the youngest person ever to win the prize and Indian children’s rights activist, Kailash Satyarthi.

Now 17, the Pakistani woman was shot by the Taliban in 2012 for her campaign for women’s rights to education.

She was also nominated for the Prize last year, the same year she published a memoir, I Am Malala, (Hachette/Little, Brown; Hachette Audio). She wowed Jon Stewart when she appeared on The Daily Show:

Confounding odds makers once again, the Nobel Prize in literature, announced today, goes to French author Patrick Modiano, whose more than 30 novels often focus on the Nazi occupation of France. The Academy described him as “a Marcel Proust of our time.” If you’re not familiar with him, you’re in good company. The Guardian comments, “Modiano is well known in France but something of an unknown quantity for even widely read people in other countries.”

The Telegraph calls Modiano’s The Search Warrant (RH/Vintage Digital, 2012) one of his best-known books. You can read a sample via OverDrive.

Several titles by Modiano are listed in on American library catalogs, including the 1974 film Lacombe, Lucien, by director Louis Malle, for which Modiano co-wrote the script which is partially based on Malle’s own experiences during the occupation and a children’s title, Catherine Certitiude.

Publisher David R. Godine’s web site today features the three Modiano titles they have published in English (the Washington Post‘s Ron Charles delivered the news to Godine, who was “staking dahlias” at the time and exclaimed, “This means we’ll be ahead this year!”):

Missing Person, Patrick Modiano, translated by Daniel Weissbort, 2004 — Also winner of the most prestigious French literary prize, the Prix Goncourt, it was reviewed by Booklist and Library Journal. Saying it is probably his “best known novel,” The Guardian describes it as being, “about a detective who loses his memory and endeavours to find it.”

Honeymoon, Patrick Modiano, 1995 — also reviewed by Booklist and Library Journal 

Catherine Certitude, Patrick Modiano — A children’s title, it was reviewed by several library publications. The following is the publisher’s description:

This charming book will delight any child — or adult — who appreciates ballet, Paris, New York, childhood, and mystery (not necessarily in that order). The book’s plot is deceptively simple: Catherine, the eponymous heroine, begins her story watching her own daughter demonstrate jazz steps in their ballet school on a snowy afternoon in New York. Memory takes her (and the reader) back to her childhood, spent in the tenth arrondissement of Paris. In her youth, Catherine lives with her gentle father, Georges Certitude, who runs a shipping business with his partner, a loud, failed poet named Casterade. The real partners in this story, however, are the father and daughter who share the simple pleasures of daily life: sitting in the church square, walking to school, going to her ballet class every Thursday afternoon.

As a result of the prize, Yale University Press has moved up the publication of the following title from January to November:

Suspended Sentences: Three Novellas, Patrick Modiano, translated by Mark Polizzotti

Includes Afterimage, Suspended Sentences, and Flowers of Ruin.

Three upcoming major book awards will be announced within a week of each other.

First, the 2014 Nobel Prize in Literature will be announced this Thursday, Oct. 9. The current favorites are Haruki Murakami, whose books are owned widely by U.S. libraries, and Kenyan writer Ngũgĩ wa Thiong’o, whose works are available in the U.S., but are less widely owned.

Don’t take the wagering too seriously, however, as the Christian Science Monitor outlines, this award is notoriously difficult to predict.

A week from tomorrow, on Tuesday, October 14, the Man Booker Prize will be presented by the Duchess of Cornwall  at a ceremony at London’s Guildhall. This is the first time that Americans have been allowed in to the competition. Two made itto the shortlist of six titles; To Rise Again at a Decent Hour by Joshua Ferris and We Are All Completely Beside Ourselves by Karen Joy Fowler. Currently, both are trailing in the odds. Neel Mukherjee is in the lead for The Lives Of Others, followed closely by Richard Flanagan, The Narrow Road To The Deep North.

The next day, Wednesday, Oct. 15, sees the release of the shortlist of finalists for the National Book Awards (winners to be announced on Nov. 19). Now that Americans are included in the Booker Awards, it would have been interesting if there were overlaps.  However, just one title was on both longlists, Richard Powers’ Orfeo, and it did not make it to the Booker shortlist.

The founder of the indie rock band The Mountain Goats, John Darnielle, was interviewed on NPR’s Fresh Air yesterday. He is also the author of Wolf in White Van, (Macmillan/FSG), released on Monday and just announced as one of the titles on the National Book Awards longlist. The interview begins with Darnielle reading from the opening of the book. Listen here.

The book is also reviewed on NPR’s web site.

The author is also interviewed in the new issue of  New York Magazine.

OverDrive Sample

Note: Some sources say this is Darnielle’s first novel, but it’s actually his second, after Black Sabbath’s Master of Reality, (2008), which is still available from Bloomsbury/Continiuum and is on several library catalogs.

The National Book Awards today announces the final of the four longlists, the fiction nominees.

Four of the titles are LibraryReads picks and six are IndieNext picks (updated from earlier story; which didn’t include the IndieNext picks for October).

As on the nonfiction list, independent presses make a good showing, with three of the ten titles; one from Grove Atlantic and two from W.W. Norton (the latter had three titles on the nonfiction lists).

There’s little crossover with the Man Booker Award. Of the four Americans on that longlist, only one appears on this one, Richard Powers, Orfeo (Norton), which did not make it to the shortlist.

Finalists will be announced on Oct. 15. Winners in all categories will be announced at a ceremony in New York on Nov. 19 hosted by Daniel Handler, (a.k.a. Lemony Snicket).

Links, in the list below, are to the National Book Award annotations.

Rabih Alameddine, An Unnecessary Woman (Grove Atlantic/ Grove Press)

Molly Antopol, The UnAmericans (Norton); An IndieNext pick

John Darnielle, Wolf in White Van (Macmillan/ FSG); published this week; An IndieNext pick

Anthony Doerr, All the Light We Cannot See (S&S/Scribner) — Both a LibraryReads and an an IndieNext pick

Phil Klay, Redeployment (Penguin Press)

Emily St. John Mandel, Station Eleven (RH/Knopf) — LibraryReads pick

Elizabeth McCracken, Thunderstruck & Other Stories (RH/Dial)

Richard Powers, Orfeo (Norton) — Both a LibraryReads and an an IndieNext pick

Marilynne Robinson, Lila (Macmillan/FSG) — IndieNext pick

Jane Smiley, Some Luck (RH/Knopf) — LibraryReads & IndieNext picks — to be published, 10/7/14

Following yesterday’s announcement of the poetry longlist, the National Book Awards today announces the nonfiction nominees.

The titles include one that hasn’t been published yet, Walter Isaacson’s The Innovators: How a Group of Inventors, Hackers, Geniuses, and Geeks Created the Digital Revolution, (Simon & Schuster, Oct 7; Vintage Espanol, 11/4; Thorndike, 1/7/15).

The list is dominated by weighty tomes, so it is refreshing that it also includes Roz Chast’s graphic memoir, Can’t We Talk About Something More Pleasant?, (Macmillan/Bloomsbury USA).

Continuing a family tradition, Evan Osnos, son of Peter Osnos, former Washington Post reporter and founder of Public Affairs (now an imprint of Perseus), is nominated for his book, based on his reporting on China for the New Yorker, Age of Ambition: Chasing Fortune, Truth and Faith in the New China, (Macmillan/ FSG)

In this age of large corporate publishing, independent publisher W.W. Norton published 3 of the ten titles on the list, tying with Macmillan.

Links, in the list below, are to the National Book Award annotations.

Roz Chast, Can’t We Talk About Something More Pleasant? (Macmillan/Bloomsbury USA)

John Demos, The Heathen School: A Story of Hope and Betrayal in the Age of the Early Republic
(RH/ Knopf)

Anand Gopal, No Good Men Among the Living: America, the Taliban, and the War through Afghan Eyes
(Macmillan/Holt)

Nigel Hamilton, The Mantle of Command: FDR at War, 1941 – 1942 (Houghton Mifflin Harcourt)

Walter Isaacson, The Innovators: How a Group of Inventors, Hackers, Geniuses, and Geeks Created the Digital Revolution (Simon & Schuster)

John Lahr, Tennessee Williams: Mad Pilgrimage of the Flesh (Norton)

Evan Osnos, Age of Ambition: Chasing Fortune, Truth, and Faith in the New China (Macmillan/FSG)

Ronald C. Rosbottom, When Paris Went Dark: The City of Light Under German Occupation, 1940-1944
(Hachette/ Little, Brown)

Matthew Stewart, Nature’s God: The Heretical Origins of the American Republic (Norton)

Edward O. Wilson, The Meaning of Human Existence (Norton/Liveright)

Many were surprised that David Mitchell’s The Bone Clocks, (Random House, 9/2/14; Recorded Books) didn’t make the transition from the Booker longlist to the shortlist, but Mitchell can take solace in the fact that it debuts at #3 on the 9/21 NYT Hardcover Fiction best Seller list, the highest spot so far for any of the published longlist titles.

Wendy Bartlett, head of collection development at Cuyahoga P.L, Ohio, is a fan. She alerted branch staff last week,

I love it when the customers are ahead of me! David Mitchell (Cloud Atlas) has come roaring back with yet another spendidly written, mind-bending read. I thought The Thousand Autumns of Jacob DeZoet was brilliant, but this book is astounding, and the customers have snatched every last copy.

The heroine — if you can call her that — is Holly Sykes (Holly, as in GoLightly? Sykes as in Bill Sykes from Oliver Twist?) David Mitchell loves nothing more than to keep you wondering, and wonder you will. He’s also one of the most evocative writers I’ve ever read, literally painting pictures with words — it’s no wonder Hollywood is tempted to make films of his books. To say he enjoys playing with the timeline, and your reality, is an understatement, and of course, that’s his plan. It’s your job to relax and enjoy the ride.

You don’t really read Mitchell, so much as experience him. If you haven’t read Mitchell, this is the perfect novel with which to start.

Happy Experiencing!

You can read the first chapter via OverDrive.

The National Book Awards long lists are being announced this week.

First up is the Young People’s Literature list. It will be followed by poetry tomorrow, nonfiction on Wednesday and, finally, fiction on Thursday.

Most of the names on this list are already award-winning authors and many have had titles on the longlist before (although none have won). The two relative newcomers are Kate Milford, author of Greenglass House, and Gail Giles, Girls Like Us.

The winners will be announced at a ceremony in New York on Nov. 19 hosted by Daniel Handler, (a.k.a. Lemony Snicket).

Links are to the National Book Foudation annotations:

The Impossible Knife of Memory
Laurie Halse Anderson
(Viking/ Penguin Group USA)
Speak was a 1999 finalist

Girls Like Us
Gail Giles
(Candlewick Press)

Skink-No Surrender
Carl Hiaasen
(Alfred A. Knopf Books for Young Readers/ Random House)
Hoot, was a  Newbery Honor title.

Greenglass House
Kate Milford
(Houghton Mifflin Harcourt/Clarion Books)

Threatened
Eliot Schrefer
(Scholastic Press)
The author’s previous book, Endangered, was a 2012 finalist

The Port Chicago 50: Disaster, Mutiny, and the Fight for Civil Rights
Steve Sheinkin
(Roaring Brook Press/ Macmillan Publishers)
Bomb: The Race to Build and Steal The World’s Most Dangerous Weapon was a 2012 finalist

100 Sideways Miles
Andrew Smith
(Simon & Schuster Books for Young Readers/ Simon & Schuster)
Grasshopper Jungle, won the 2014 Boston Globe-Horn Book Fiction Award

Noggin
John Corey Whaley
(Atheneum Books for Young Readers/ Simon & Schuster)
Where Things Come Back, was a Printz Award Winner

Revolution: The Sixties Trilogy, Book Two
Deborah Wiles
(Scholastic Press)
Each Little Bird That Sings, was a National Book Award Finalist

Brown Girl Dreaming
Jacqueline Woodson
(Nancy Paulsen Books/ Penguin Group (USA))
The author was a finalist for both Locomotion and Hush

The Man Booker shortlist was announced today. This is the first year that authors from the U.S. qualify. Far from dominating the shortlist, as some had feared, only two made the transition, Joshua Ferris and Karen Fowler.

Three are British (Howard Jacobson, Ali Smith, and Calcutta-born Neel Mukherjee) and one is Australian (Richard Flanagan).

The list is male-dominated, with only two women, Ali Smith and Karen Fowler (hello, Bailey’s Women’s Prize For Fiction, there is still a need for you).

 Shortlist

To Rise Again at a Decent Hour, Joshua Ferris (Hachette/Little,Brown, 5/13/14)

The Narrow Road to the Deep North, Richard Flanagan (RH/Knopf. 8/12/14)

We Are All Completely Beside Ourselves, Karen Joy Fowler (Penguin/Putnam/Marian Wood; 5/30/13; also in trade pbk)

J, Howard Jacobson, (RH/Crown/Hogarth, 10/14/14, moved up from 3/10/15)

The Lives of Others, Neel Mukherjee (Norton; 9780393247909; recently acquired to be released, 10/1/14)

How to be Both, Ali Smith (RH/Pantheon; 12/2/14)

One of the big surprises is that David Mitchell’s The Bone Clocks, called by Ursula K Le Guin, “600 pages of metafictional shenanigans in relentlessly brilliant prose” and leading odds in U.K betting, did not move to the short list.

Longlist Only

    
The Blazing World, Siri Hustvedt (S&S; 3/11/14; Thorndike)

The Wake, Paul Kingsnorth (Unbound) — published via the crowd-funded site Unbound; available as an ebook on Axis 360

The Bone Clocks, David Mitchell (Random House, 9/2/14; Recorded Books)

Us, David Nicholls (Harper, 10/8/14; HarperAudio)

The Dog, Joseph O’Neill (RH/)Pantheon, 10/9/14; RH Audio)

Orfeo, Richard Powers (Norton, 1/20/14; Thorndike; Recorded Books)

History of the Rain, Niall Williams (Macmillan/Bloomsbury, 5/6/14)

American author Ann Leckie’s debut novel, Ancillary Justice, (Hachette/Orbit; trade pbk original; Recorded Books), the first in a planned space opera trilogy called Imperial Reich, won the Hugo Award at a ceremony held in London last night.

A review in the Pittsburgh Post Gazette said that the book “puts a new spin on old tales, forces us to face quandaries we’d never even imagine in our day-to-day lives, and shows us life from fresh, impossible perspectives,” and that  “her unique narrator may be the novel’s most notable innovation.” Read a sample from OverDrive here.

The book has already won the Nebula Best Novel award, the Arthur C Clarke award, as well as tying for the British Science Fiction Association Best Novel award.

The next book in  the trilogy, Ancillary Sword, is coming in October (Hachette/Orbit, original trade pbk).

The author lives in St. Louis, Missouri.

The first Man Booker longlist to include American authors has been released. Of the 13 novels, 4 are by Americans. As The Economist wryly observes, the list “has divided headline writers into those who prefer ‘Commonwealth writers edged out’ and those who have chosen ‘Donna Tartt snubbed’.”

But the Guardian gets to one of the most pressing issues,   exploring, “Why The Longlist Has Bewildered The Bookies,“ while taking a familiar swipe at American writers (similar to the Nobel Awards jurist’s claim that Americans are “too insular” to be able to win that prize), by saying, “American novelists tend to write about the US, and none of the four – Joshua Ferris, Karen Joy Fowler, Siri Hustvedt, Richard Powers – set their selected books abroad. So … there’s a marked sense of restricted horizons …”

The Economist, on the other hand, picks American Richard Powers’ Orfeo as one of the two most interesting books on the list. The other is The Narrow Road to the Deep North, by Australian Richard Flanagan.

It happens that just before this announcement, we heard Seattle Public Library’s David Wright describe his excitement about that book, calling the author, “a consummate stylist, but with a style that is in service to the realities he’s writing about, which are often deeply painful and tragic. That is certainly true in The Narrow Road to the Deep North, which depicts with a fair amount of detail the horrific experience of POWs in WWII (Flanagan’s father was a survivor of the Thai-Burma death railway) … He is so skillful in showing how these events affect mens’ lives … his writing is devastating, generous, and deeply caring.”

Flanagan is also modest. He tells the Guardian that he was “stunned” to learn he was on the list.

The author who may be the most surprised to make the list is Paul Kingsnorth. Not only is The Wake his first novel, he had so much trouble getting it published, that he finally turned to crowd-funding it via the U.K. website Unbound. The author describes the novel as “a strange and left-field book,” written in its own language, a version of Anglo-Saxon English.

A taste of it below:

The longlist, with American publishing information, below:

Available now:

To Rise Again at a Decent Hour, Joshua Ferris (Hachette/Little,Brown, 5/13/14)

We Are All Completely Beside Ourselves, Karen Joy Fowler (Penguin/Putnam/Marian Wood; 5/30/13; also in trade pbk)

The Blazing World, Siri Hustvedt (S&S; 3/11/14; Thorndike)

The Wake, Paul Kingsnorth (Unbound) — published via the crowd-funded site Unbound; available as an ebook on Axis 360

Orfeo, Richard Powers (Norton, 1/20/14; Thorndike; Recorded Books)

History of the Rain, Niall Williams (Macmillan/Bloomsbury, 5/6/14)

Forthcoming:

The Narrow Road to the Deep North, Richard Flanagan (RH/Knopf. 8/12/14)

J, Howard Jacobson, (RH/Crown/Hogarth (3/10/15)

The Bone Clocks, David Mitchell (Random House, 9/2/14; Recorded Books)

Us, David Nicholls (Harper, 10/8/14; HarperAudio)

The Dog, Joseph O’Neill (RH/)Pantheon, 10/9/14; RH Audio)

Not Yet Published in the U.S.:

The Lives of Others, Neel Mukherjee (Chatto & Windus)

How to be Both, Ali Smith (Hamish Hamilton)

If you’re feeling discouraged about the future of books and reading, just look at the kids in the following video.

The story, created for NBC Nightly News, features author Kate DiCamillo talking to a very receptive group of kids about her struggle to become an author. It did not appear on Friday night’s broadcast, but is in the Nightly News Web site.

DiCamillo will accept the Newbery Award tomorrow night at ALA in Las Vegas for Flora and Ulysses: The Illuminated Adventures, (Candlewick Press)

The just-released LibraryReads list of the ten books arriving in July that librarian love, offers some great readers advisory titles (over half are debuts). It’s also a reminder to nominate titles for upcoming lists (how-to here).

At BEA, the LibraryReads panel gave some helpful tips on how to use these lists:

1) You no longer have to admit “I haven’t read anything great lately,” your colleagues have. Each LibraryReads annotation is a readers advisory handsell you can steal.

2) The lists began in September, so there are now over 100 titles you can recommend. Check out our downloadable list —  LibraryReads-All-Lists-Through-July-2014. sort it by category and you have an instant list for creating displays, or to use when you’re stuck trying to recommend a recent book in a particular category.

2) The lists are handy R.A. training tools which demonstrate how to quickly communicate why you love a title.

On the July list, librarian favorite Rainbow Rowell gets her second #1 LibraryReads pick with Landline, (Macmillan/St. Martin’s; Macmillan Audio; Thorndike), after her YA novel, Fangirl, was the pick for the inaugural September list. Excitement has spread to booksellers, who also include it on their Indie Next July list.

Among the five debuts on the list, is Dollbaby by Laura Lane McNeal (Penguin/Pamela Dorman Books). You can join us for a live chat with the author next week, as part of our Penguin First Flights Debut Author program.. Below is the LibraryReads annotation:

“In this coming-of-age story set in the Civil Rights era, Ibby is dropped off at the home of her eccentric grandmother in New Orleans after the death of her beloved father. Filled with colorful characters, family secrets and lots of New Orleans tidbits, this book will appeal to fans of Saving Ceecee Honeycutt.” —  Vicki Nesting, St. Charles Parish Library, Destrehan, LA

Also among the debuts is the book Stephen Colbert and fellow Amazon victim Sherman Alexie recently urged people to buy, via Powell’s, rather than Amazon, California by Edan Lepucki (Hachette/Little, Brown, July 8; audio from Dreamscape).

“Driven away from the violence of cities and a crumbling society, Cal and Frida live an isolated existence, struggling to survive on what they grow and forage. When an unplanned pregnancy pushes the couple to search for other people, they discover an unexpected community. This well-written debut is great for apocalyptic fiction fans and fans of realistic, character-driven fiction.” — Sara Kennedy, Delaware County District Library, Delaware, OH

Published by a very small press in Great Britain (it was only their second book) and coming in September from Coffee House Press in the U.S., A Girl Is A Half-Formed Thing by Eimear McBride, the author’s debut novel, won the Baileys Women’s Prize for Fiction, announced in London last night.

The book, which the 37-year-old author wrote ten years ago, was initially rejected by agents and publishers who considered it too difficult to sell. The author put it away until she tried again with Galley Beggar Press, a start-up in the author’s home town of Norwich. It received glowing reviews that acknowledged the book’s unconventional language, described by the Guardian as “devoid of commas, a fractured, poetic, pre-conscious voice, pregnant with full stops and half rhymes … But it actually feels like language anyone could read and understand. Its subject matter is the real difficulty, the story of a young girl, struggling to deal with her older brother’s illness – a brain tumour – and the abuse she experiences.” It went on to win the newly-created Goldsmith’s Prize for Literature and was published in paperback by Macmillan/Faber & Faber.

McBride won over competition from several literary heavy weighs, including Donna Tartt, for The Goldfinch. She says she has “nearly finished” a second novel.