2008 Man Booker Prize Longlist Predictions

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.

Publisher's Comments:

New South Wales, 1817. Margaret Catchpole is stranded at a settler's homestead as the floodwater draws in, and she finds herself facing death - as she has several times before. She looks back over her life - the complex and stormy partnership with Will Laud, a 'hell-born-babe', that led her into the world of smuggling and in to a double life. After Will is forced to flee the country, Margaret is taken on as a nursemaid by the wealthy Cobbold family, but a crime against them means she is tried and sentenced to hang. She avoids death but when an elaborate gaol escape fails, Will is shot dead and Margaret captured. Sentenced once more to hang, she looks death full in the face. But she doesn't die. Her sentence is transmuted to transportation for life to Australia. The novel explores a deeply divided society. Ironically, by reaching the lowest depths and being cast out by the society which spawned her, Margaret finds her true role as an independent pioneer in a young colony.

Carol Birch was longlisted for the Man Booker Prize in 2003 for Turn Again Home.

Publisher's Comments:

Che is raised in isolated privilege by his New York grandmother, precocious son of radical Harvard students in the sixties. Yearning for his famous outlaw parents, denied all access to television and the news, he takes hope from his long haired teenage neighbour who predicts they will come for you, man. They'll break you out of here. Soon Che too is an outlaw, fleeing down subways, abandoning seedy motels at night, as he is pitched into a journey that leads him to a hippy commune in the jungle of tropical Queensland. Here he slowly, bravely, confronts his life, learning that nothing is what it seems. "His Illegal Self" is an achingly beautiful and emotional story of the love between a young woman and a little boy, and a wonderful journey of self-discovery.

Peter Carey has won the Man Booker Prize twice, for The True History of the Kelly Gang in 2001 and for Oscar and Lucinda in 1988.  In addition, he was shortlisted for Illywhacker in 1985 and longlisted for Theft: A Love Story in 2006.

Publisher's Comments:

Robbie Coyle dreams of going to space. In 1970s Scotland this ambition marks him out almost as much as his eccentric family does in particular, his avidly socialist father. Indoctrinated in the ways of the Left, Robbie can't entertain the idea of going into orbit with the capitalist Americans. So he gets a 'Teach Yourself Russian' book from the library and settles down with Einstein's Meaning of Relativity by his side. Later, however, his fantasies take on a darker shade.In an imagined communist Scotland, post-World War II, the young recruit Robert finds himself at the Installation, a closed, bleak town run under surveillance and dedicated to scientific research. Astronomers have discovered a black hole and the Party will stop at nothing to attain it. The Red Star, as it comes to be known, heralds both the awakening and the extinguishing of Robert's adulthood: the discovery of cruelty and of love; and the realization that the most passionate of dreams may be merely a chimera.

Andrew Crumey has written several other novels, including Mobius Dick.

Publisher's Comments:

There is an ancient saying that when lovers fall out, a plane goes down. "A Case of Exploding Mangoes" is the story of one such plane. Why did a Hercules C130, the world's sturdiest plane, carrying Pakistan's military dictator General Zia ul Haq, go down on 17 August, 1988? Was it because of: mechanical failure; human error; the CIA's impatience; a blind woman's curse; generals not happy with their pension plans; the mango season Or could it be your narrator, Ali Shigri? Here are the facts such as: a military dictator reads the Quran every morning as if it was his daily horoscope; under officer Ali Shigri carries a deadly message on the tip of his sword; his friend Obaid answers all life's questions with a splash of eau de cologne and a quote from Rilke; and a crow has crossed the Pakistani border illegally.As young Shigri moves from a mosque hall to his military barracks before ending up in a Mughal dungeon, there are questions that haunt him: What does it mean to betray someone and still love them? How many names does Allah really have? Who killed his father, Colonel Shigri? Who will kill his killers? And where the hell has Obaid disappeared to?

This is Mohammed Hanif's first novel.

Publisher's Comments:

Rhodesia - a place of great beauty, but also of terrible, man-made, tragedy. The Voluptuous Delights of Peanut Butter and Jam is, above all else, a magical evocation of childhood; at times laugh-out-loud funny, at others heartbreakingly sad. It tells the story of two young sisters, Nyree and Cia O'Callohan, who live on a remote farm in the East of what was Rhodesia in the late 1970s. Beneath the dripping vines of the Vumba rainforest, and under the tutelage of their heretical grandfather, Oupa, theirs is a seductive world laced with African paganism, bastardised Catholicism and the lore of the Brothers Grimm - until their idyll is shattered forever by their orphaned cousin, Ronin. His arrival at the farm sets in motion a chain of events that result in tragedy and the loss of innocence.

This is Lauren Liebenberg's first novel.

Publisher's Comments:

The message was short. 'I want to see you now. I want you to come to me, it doesn't matter how late it is, and tell me exactly what you want from me.' Like the world around him, at the dawn of the twenty-first century, Adam Kellas's life is showing distinct signs of cracking apart. Against his better judgement, Kellas a divorced, unstable, spurned by his lover and by the world of letters, accepts a war assignment from his newspaper. It is the beginning of a journey which takes him from the mountains of Afghanistan to the elegant dinner tables of north London, the marshlands of the American South and, ultimately, to the darkest realms of the human imagination. Only the memory of the beautiful, elusive Astrid, a fellow reporter in Afghanistan, offers him the possibility of hope. With all the explosive drama of The People's Act of Love, James Meek's new novel spans continents and cultures. It is a timeless tale of folly and the pursuit of love, set against the incendiary politics of our time.

James Meek was longlisted for the Man Booker Prize in 2005 for The People's Act of Love.

Publisher's Comments:

The world is a puzzling, sometimes frightening place for Jessica Fontaine. As a child she only finds contentment in playing the piano and wandering alone in the empty spaces of Audlands Hall, the dilapidated country house where she grows up. Twenty-five years later, divorced, with her son still living at home, Jessica remains preoccupied by the desire to create space around her. Then her volatile ex-husband reappears, the first of several surprises that both transform Jessica's present and give her a startling new perspective on the past. THE LANGUAGE OF OTHERS tells the absorbing story of a woman who spends much of her life feeling that she is out of step with the real world, until she discovers why. Related with humour and compassion, it offers a fresh, illuminating insight into what it means to be 'normal'.

Clare Morrall was shortlisted for the Man Booker Prize in 2003 for Astonishing Splashes of Colour.

Publisher's Comments:

A tall, yellow-haired young European traveller calling himself 'Mogor dell'Amore', the Mughal of Love, arrives at the court of the real Grand Mughal, the Emperor Akbar, with a tale to tell that begins to obsess the whole imperial capital. The stranger claims to be the child of a lost Mughal princess, the youngest sister of Akbar's grandfather Babar: Qara Koz, 'Lady Black Eyes', a great beauty believed to possess powers of enchantment and sorcery, who is taken captive first by an Uzbek warlord, then by the Shah of Persia, and finally becomes the lover of a certain Argalia, a Florentine soldier of fortune, commander of the armies of the Ottoman Sultan. When Argalia returns home with his Mughal mistress the city is mesmerized by her presence, and much trouble ensues."The Enchantress of Florence" is the story of a woman attempting to command her own destiny in a man's world. It brings together two cities that barely know each other - the hedonistic Mughal capital, in which the brilliant emperor wrestles daily with questions of belief, desire and the treachery of sons, and the equally sensual Florentine world of powerful courtesans, humanist philosophy and inhuman torture, where Argalia's boyhood friend "il Machia" - Niccolr Machiavelli - is learning, the hard way, about the true brutality of power. These two worlds, so far apart, turn out to be uncannily alike, and the enchantments of women hold sway over them both. But is Mogor's story true? And if so, then what happened to the lost princess? And if he's a liar, must he die?

Salman Rushdie was recently awarded the "Best of Booker" award for Midnight's Children, in honour of the 40th anniversary of the Man Booker Prize in 2008.  Midnight's Children also won the "Booker of Bookers" award in 1993 for the 25th anniversary of the Man Booker Prize, and won the prize in 1991. In addition, Sir Rushdie has been shortlisted for The Satanic Verses in 1998, The Moor's Last Sigh in 1995, and Shame in 1983.  He was longlisted for Shalimar the Clown in 2005.

Publisher's Comments:

'A magical, exuberant tragic-comic vision of post-colonial Malaysia reminiscent of Rushdie and Roy. In prose of acrobatic grace, Samarasan conjures a vibrant portrait, by turns intimate and sweeping, of characters and a country coming of age. The debut of a significant, and thrilling new talent.' Peter Ho Davies Set in Malaysia, this spellbinding, exuberant first novel introduces us to a prosperous Indian immigrant family, as it slowly peels away its closely guarded secrets. When the family's servant girl, Chellam, is dismissed from the big house for unnamed crimes, it is only the latest in a series of losses that have shaken six-year-old Aasha's life. Her grandmother has passed away under mysterious circumstances and her older sister has disappeared for a new life abroad, with no plans to return. Her parents, meanwhile, seem to be hiding something away - from themselves, and from one another. As the novel tells us the story of the years leading up to these events, we learn what has happened to the hopes and dreams of a family caught up in Malaysia's troubled post-colonial history. What bought the Rajasekharan family to the Big House in Malaysia?What was Chellam's unforgivable crime?

Why did the eldest daughter leave the country under strained circumstances? What is Appa - the respectable family patriarch - hiding from his wife and his children? Through this vibrant cast of characters, and through a masterful evocation of the clashes and strains in a country where Malays, Indians and Chinese inhabitants vie for their positions in society, Preeta Samarasan brings us an enthralling saga of one household and the world beyond it.

This is Preeta Samarasan's first novel.

Publisher's Comments:

"Breath" is the story of lost youth, its attractions, its compulsions, its moments of heartbreak and of madness. Bruce Pike, affectionately known as Pikelet, is irresistibly drawn to the sea. One summer he defies his parents and goes surfing for the first time. This experience is to mark his adolescence with astonishing power, throwing him together with his oddball friend Loonie, and their hero, Sando, whose life by the shore is not without complications. Together they learn what it is to be extraordinary, how to push their bodies and emotions to the limits, and how to live with the emptiness of having left that intensity behind.

Tim Winton was shortlisted for the Man Booker Prize in 2002 for Dirt Music, and in 1995 for The Riders.