2008 Official Man Booker Prize Shortlist

The official Man Booker Prize Shortlist for 2008 was announced on September 9th, 2008.

The chair of the judges, Michael Portillo, said:

"The judges commend the six titles to readers with great enthusiam. These novels are intensely readable, each of them an extraordinary example of imagination and narrative. These fine page-turning stories nonetheless raise highly thought-provoking ideas and issues. These books in every case are both ambitious and approachable."

The TurboBookSnob is astonished at the exclusion of former Man Booker prize winners Salman Rushdie and John Berger. She is also amazed at how quickly the shortlist was published this year. It was almost as if they had decided well ahead of the actual announcement.

The authors of these books originate from Australia, England, Ireland, and India, There are five male authors on the list, and one female. Sebastian Barry was shortlisted for the Man Booker Prize in 2005. Philip Hensher and Linda Grant have both been longlisted for the prize, and Linda Grant was also a finalist for the Orange Prize.

Want to check out the TurboBookSnob's Shortlist Prediction? Click here.

2008 Shortlist
	Title/Author	TurboBookSnob's Review
	The White Tiger by Aravind Adiga Publisher: Atlantic Books	TurboBookSnob Review
Publisher's Comments: Balram Halwai is the White Tiger - the smartest boy in his village. His family is too poor for him to afford for him to finish school and he has to work in a teashop, breaking coals and wiping tables. But Balram gets his break when a rich man hires him as a chauffeur, and takes him to live in Delhi. The city is a revelation. As he drives his master to shopping malls and call centres, Balram becomes increasingly aware of immense wealth and opportunity all around him, while knowing that he will never be able to gain access to that world. As Balram broods over his situation, he realizes that there is only one way he can become part of this glamorous new India - by murdering his master."The White Tiger" presents a raw and unromanticised India, both thrilling and shocking - from the desperate, almost lawless villages along the Ganges, to the booming Wild South of Bangalore and its technology and outsourcing centres. The first-person confession of a murderer, "The White Tiger" is as compelling for its subject matter as for the voice of its narrator - amoral, cynical, unrepentant, yet deeply endearing. This is Aravind Adiga's first novel.

	The Secret Scripture by Sebastian Barry Publisher: Faber and Faber	TurboBookSnob Review This beautifully written tale of redemption should marks the second time Barry was shortlisted for the Man Booker Prize in four years.
Publisher's Comments: Nearing her one hundredth birthday, Roseanne McNulty faces an uncertain future, as the Roscommon Regional Mental hospital where she's spent the best part of her adult life prepares for closure. Over the weeks leading up to this upheaval, she talks often with her psychiatrist Dr Grene. This relationship, guarded but trusting after so many years, intensifies and complicates as Dr Grene mourns the death of his wife. Told through their respective journals, the story that emerges - of Roseanne's family in 1930s Sligo - is at once shocking and deeply beautiful. Refracted through the haze of memory and retelling, Roseanne's story becomes an alternative, secret history of Ireland's changing character. Exquisitely written, it is also the story of a life blighted by terrible mistreatment and ignorance, and yet marked still by love and passion and hope. Sebastian Barry was shortlisted for the Man Booker Prize in 2005 for A Long Long Way.

	The Sea of Poppies by Amitav Ghosh Publisher: Hodder & Stoughton	TurboBookSnob Review Coming Soon!
Publisher's Comments: At the heart of this epic saga, set just before the Opium Wars, is an old slaving-ship, The Ibis. Its destiny is a tumultuous voyage across the Indian Ocean, its crew a motley array of sailors and stowaways, coolies and convicts. In a time of colonial upheaval, fate has thrown together a truly diverse cast of Indians and Westerners, from a bankrupt Raja to a widowed villager, from an evangelical English opium trader to a mulatto American freedman. As their old family ties are washed away they, like their historical counterparts, come to view themselves as jahaj-bhais or ship-brothers. An unlikely dynasty is born, which will span continents, races and generations. The vast sweep of this historical adventure spans the lush poppy fields of the Ganges, the rolling high seas, and the exotic backstreets of China. But it is the panorama of characters, whose diaspora encapsulates the vexed colonial history of the East itself, which makes Sea of Poppies so breathtakingly alive -- a masterpiece from one of the world's finest novelists. This is the first time that Amitav Ghosh has been nominated for the Man Booker Prize.

	The Clothes on Their Backs by Linda Grant Publisher: Little, Brown	TurboBookSnob Review Coming Soon!
Publisher's Comments: In a red brick mansion block off the Marylebone Road, Vivien, a sensitive, bookish girl grows up sealed off from both past and present by her timid refugee parents. Then one morning a glamorous uncle appears, dressed in a mohair suit, with a diamond watch on his wrist and a girl in a leopard-skin hat on his arm. Why is Uncle Sandor so violently unwelcome in her parents' home? This is a novel about survival - both banal and heroic - and a young woman who discovers the complications, even betrayals, that inevitably accompany the fierce desire to live. Set against the backdrop of a London from the 1950s to the present day, The Clothes on Their Backs is a wise and tender novel about the clothes we choose to wear, the personalities we dress ourselves in, and about how they define us all. Linda Grant was longlisted for the Man Booker Prize in 2002 for Still Here.

	The Northern Clemency by Philip Hensher Publisher: Fourth Estate	TurboBookSnob Review Coming Soon!
Publisher's Comments: An epic chronicle of the last 20 years of British life from the Booker longlisted and Granta Best of Young British novelist, Philip Hensher. Beginning in 1974 and ending with the fading of Thatcher's government in 1996, 'The Northern Clemency' is Philip Hensher's epic portrait of an entire era, a novel concerned with the lives of ordinary people and history on the move. Set in Sheffield, it charts the relationship between two families: Malcolm and Katherine Glover and their three children; and their neighbours the Sellers family, newly arrived from London so that Bernie can pursue his job with the Electricity Board. The day the Sellers move in there is a crisis across the road: Malcolm Glover has left home, convinced his wife is having an affair. The consequences of this rupture will spread throughout the lives of both couples and their children, in particular 10-year-old Tim Glover, who never quite recovers from a moment of his mother's public cruelty and the amused taunting of 15-year-old Sandra Sellers, childhood crises that will come to a head twenty years later.In the background, England is changing: from a manufacturing and industrial based economy into a new world of shops, restaurants and service industries, a shift particularly marked in the North with the miners' strike of 1984, which has a dramatic impact on both families. Inspired by the expansive scale and webs of relationships of the great nineteenth-century Russian novels, 'The Northern Clemency' shows Philip Hensher to be one of our greatest chroniclers of English life. Philip Hensher was longlisted for The Mulberry Empire in 2002.

	A Fraction of the Whole by Steve Toltz Publisher: Hamish Hamilton	TurboBookSnob Review Coming Soon!
Publisher's Comments: Martin Dean spent his entire life analyzing absolutely everything - from the benefits of suicide to the virtues of strip clubs - and passing on his self-taught knowledge to his son, Jasper. But now that his father's dead, Jasper can fully reflect on the man who raised him in intellectual captivity, and the irony is this: theirs was a great adventure. As he recollects the extraordinary events that led to his father's demise, Jasper recounts a boyhood of outrageous schemes and shocking discoveries - about his infamous criminal uncle, his mysteriously absent mother, and Martin's constant battle to leave his mark on the world. From the Australian bush to the cafes of Paris; from the highs of first love to the lows of failed ambition, this is an unforgettable, rollicking and deeply moving family story. This is the first time that Steve Toltz has been nominated for the Man Booker Prize.