After the Booker longlist, I’m reading the Costa shortlists (Novels and First Novels - might or might not get to the other categories, but I’m lacking the  commitment for Biography, and the interest for the other two) and probably the NBA fiction shortlist too.  I think I’ll not bother with the Orange Prize though I have read a couple of them.  This list doesn’t excite me much (and one of the judges is a novelist whose work I think is dreadful) but Pure might be interesting.  There’s an overlap of two here with the Booker.  The decision will be announced on 4 January 2012.

NOVELS

Read

Julian Barnes The Sense of an Ending (Jonathan Cape)

Masterful but not that interesting, as I’ve said below. I may have more to say in comparing it to the others.

To Read

John Burnside A Summer of Drowning (Jonathan Cape) 
Andrew Miller Pure (Sceptre) - section and overall winner
Louisa Young My Dear I Wanted to Tell You (HarperCollins) 

FIRST NOVELS

Read

Patrick McGuinness The Last Hundred Days (Seren)

I didn’t think much of this: see dismissal on the Booker list page.  Unlike the Costa judges I found it neither funny nor insightful and the only compulsion was to get to the end.  On the other hand I’ve just remembered I went to school with a Pat McGuinness… who I guess this can’t be. 2/5

Kevin Barry City of Bohane (Jonathan Cape) 

Stupendous. A broken, tainted, nostalgic West-of-Ireland city thrashing and smoldering as it remembers the ‘lost-time’, Bohane is tribal, brutal, fashion-conscious (velveteen puffa jackets and vinyl brothel-creepers), sentimental, full of heart and completely heartless. The language is pure energy, the characters are vivid and real and the story is timeless. It seems that when it all breaks down, we will be mediaeval once again, writhing, dreaming and plotting in a real human society, face to face, shkelp to shkelp. My book of the year so far. 5/5.

Chirstie Watson Tiny Sunbirds Far Away by Christie (Quercus) - section winner

This is tremendous. It’s far from subtle and really quite polemical (on female genital mutilation, the oil companies and corruption) but also well written and moving: I sniffled. The shape of the story is straightforward, as 12yo Blessing leaves her privileged life in Lagos for an initially confusing and frightening life on the Niger Delta, then experiences several shocking things (and at this point the story seems to get away from the writer, galloping along a bit) before it all resolves. A few of the characters are too emblematic (Ezikiel and Dan, and also Grandma, great as she is) in a way that can’t quite be explained away by the narrator’s naivety, but Blessing’s voice sounds true and the description is fresh and vivid. Some parts are not for the squeamish.  4/5

To Read

Kerry Young Pao (Bloomsbury)