Even though I have been familiar with the Man Booker Prize for Fiction for some time, it has not been a book award that I have closely followed because it was central to books published in the United Kingdom. Beginning in 2014, however, the prize has been opened up to books published in all countries and the United States is being represented by five published works, which represents about 38 percent of the longlist.
The longlist was announced on 23 July and it contained thirteen works of literary fiction. The list, in its entirety, is as follows:
- History of the Rain by Niall Williams (Ireland)
- Orfeo by Richard Powers (USA)
- The Dog by Joseph O'Neill (USA)
- The Wake by Paul Kingsnorth (UK)
- We Are All Completely Beside Ourselves by Karen Joy Fowler (USA)
- How to be Both by Ali Smith (UK, Scotland)
- The Blazing World by Siri Hustvedt (USA)
- The Lives of Others by Neel Mukherjee (UK)
- To Rise Again at a Decent Hour by Joshua Ferris (USA)
- J by Howard Jacobson (UK)
- The Bone Clocks by David Mitchell (UK, Ireland)
- The Narrow Road to the Deep North by Richard Flanagan (Tasmania)
- Us by David Nicholls (UK)
My intention is to read the entire list prior to the announcement of the winner on 14 October and I will begin my reading with History of the Rain by Niall Williams, which has the most appeal to me.
For more information on the 2014 Man Booker Prize for Fiction, I highly recommend that you visit Kirat at his YouTube channel, ObsessiveCompulsiveReader. This young man has very sophisticated reading tastes and he is obsessed witht he Man Booker Prize.
-Joseph
Soli Deo Gloria
