Here we are ladies and gents, the Man Booker Prize 2014 longlist aka my new TBR list: (from Man Book Prize
website)
about book:
Ruth Swain, the bedridden daughter of a dead poet, home from school
after a collapse, is trying to find her father through stories - and
through generations of family history in County Clare. In order to do
this Ruthie turns to the three thousand, nine hundred and fifty eight
books piled high that her father left behind. His entire, vast library
moved to her bedroom which she pledges to work her way through while
she’s still living.
about book:
Paul O'Rourke, 40 year-old slightly curmudgeonly dentist, runs a
thriving practice in New York. Yet he is discovering he needs more in
his life than a steady income and the perfect mochaccino. But what?
As Paul tries to work out the meaning of life, a Facebook page and
Twitter account appear in his name. What's at first an outrageous
violation of privacy soon becomes something more frightening: the
possibility that the online "Paul" might be a better version of the man
in the flesh. Who is doing this and will it cost Paul his sanity?
about book:
As a child, Rosemary used to talk all the time. So much so that her
parents used to tell her to start in the middle if she wanted to tell a
story. Now Rosemary has just started college and she barely talks at
all. And she definitely doesn’t talk about her family. So we're not
going to tell you too much either: you'll have to find out for yourself
what it is that makes her unhappy family unlike any other. Rosemary is
now an only child, but she used to have a sister the same age as her,
and an older brother. Both are now gone - vanished from her life. But
there's something unique about Rosemary's sister, Fern. So now she's
telling her story; a looping narrative that begins towards the end, and
then goes back to the beginning. Twice.
about book:
Artist Harriet Burden, consumed by fury at the lack of recognition
she has received from the New York art establishment, embarks on an
experiment: she hides her identity behind three male fronts who exhibit
her work as their own. And yet, even after she has unmasked herself,
there are those who refuse to believe she is the woman behind the men.
Presented as a collection of texts compiled by a scholar years after
Burden's death, the story unfolds through extracts from her notebooks,
reviews and articles, as well as testimonies from her children, her
lover, a dear friend, and others more distantly connected to her. Each
account is different, however, and the mysteries multiply.
about book:
One drowsy summer’s day in 1984, teenage runaway Holly Sykes
encounters a strange woman who offers a small kindness in exchange for
‘asylum’. Decades will pass before Holly understands exactly what sort
of asylum the woman was seeking...
The Bone Clocks follows the twists and turns of Holly’s
life, from a scarred adolescence in Gravesend to old age on Ireland’s
Atlantic coast as Europe’s oil supply dries up – a life not so far out
of the ordinary, yet punctuated by flashes of precognition, visits from
people who emerge from thin air and brief lapses in the laws of
reality. For Holly Sykes – daughter, sister, mother, guardian – is also
an unwitting player in a murderous feud played out in the shadows and
margins of our world, and may prove to be its decisive weapon.
about book:
In 2007, a New York attorney bumps into an old college buddy – and
accepts his friend’s offer of a job in Dubai, as the overseer of an
enormous family fortune. Haunted by the collapse of his relationship and
hoping for a fresh start, our strange hero begins to suspect that he
has exchanged one inferno for another.
The Dog is led by a brilliantly entertaining anti-hero.
Imprisoned by his endless powers of reasoning, hemmed in by the ethical
demands of globalized life, he is fatefully drawn towards the only
logical response to our confounding epoch.
about book:
How to be Both is a novel all about art's versatility.
Borrowing from painting's fresco technique to make an original literary
double-take, it's a fast-moving genre-bending conversation between
forms, times, truths and fictions. There's a renaissance artist of the
1460s. There's the child of a child of the 1960s. Two tales of love
and injustice twist into a singular yarn where time gets timeless,
structural gets playful, knowing gets mysterious, fictional gets real -
and all life's givens get given a second chance.
about book:
In
Orfeo, Powers tells the story of a man journeying into his
past as he desperately flees the present. Seventy-year old avant-garde
composer Peter Els opens his front door one evening to find the police
on his doorstep. His home microbiology lab – the latest experiment in
his lifelong attempt to discover musical patterns in DNA strands – has
come to the attention of Homeland Security. Panicked by the raid, Els
flees and turns fugitive, waiting for the evidence to clear him and for
the alarm to blow over. But alarm turns to national hysteria, as the
government promises a panicked nation that the ‘Bioterrorist Bach’ will
be found and brought to trial. As Els feels the noose around him
tighten, he embarks on a cross-country trip to visit, one last time, the
people he loves, those who shaped his musical journey. Through the help
of his ex-wife, his daughter, and his longtime artistic collaborator,
Els comes up with a plan to turn his disastrous collision with national
security into one last, resonant, calamitous artwork that might reach an
audience beyond his wildest dreams.
about book:
Set in the three years after the Norman invasion of 1066,
The Wake
tells the story of Buccmaster of Holland, a man from the Lincolnshire
Fens who, with a fractured band of guerilla fighters, takes up arms
against the invaders. It is a post-apocalyptic story of the brutal
shattering of lives, a tale of lost gods and haunted visions, narrated
by a man bearing witness to the end of his world.
about book:
Set in the future, a world where the past is a dangerous country, not to be talked about or visited,
J is a love story of incomparable strangeness, both tender and terrifying.
Two people fall in love, not yet knowing where they have come from or
where they are going. Kevern doesn’t know why his father always drew
two fingers across his lips when he said a world starting with a J. It
wasn’t then, and isn’t now, the time or place to be asking questions.
Ailinn too has grown up in the dark about who she was or where she
came from. On their first date Kevern kisses the bruises under her eyes.
He doesn’t ask who hurt her. Brutality has grown commonplace. They
aren’t sure if they have fallen in love of their own accord, or whether
they’ve been pushed into each other’s arms. But who would have pushed
them, and why?
Hanging over the lives of all the characters in this novel is a
momentous catastrophe – a past event shrouded in suspicion, denial and
apology, now referred to as What Happened, If It Happened.
about book:
Calcutta, 1967. Unnoticed by his family, Supratik has become
dangerously involved in extremist political activism. Compelled by an
idealistic desire to change his life and the world around him, all he
leaves behind before disappearing is this note…
The ageing patriarch and matriarch of his family, the Ghoshes,
preside over their large household, unaware that beneath the barely
ruffled surface of their lives the sands are shifting. More than
poisonous rivalries among sisters-in-law, destructive secrets, and the
implosion of the family business, this is a family unravelling as the
society around it fractures. For this is a moment of turbulence, of
inevitable and unstoppable change: the chasm between the generations,
and between those who have and those who have not, has never been
wider.
.jpg)
about book:
Us by David Nicholls tells the story of Douglas Petersen,
whose marriage of twenty-one years to Connie is almost over. When Autumn
comes around, their son Albie will leave for university. Connie has
decided to leave soon after.
But there's still the summer holidays to get through - a Grand Tour
of Europe's major cities - and over the course of the journey, Douglas
devises a plan to win back the love of his wife and repair his troubled
relationship with his son. Forced to understand why his marriage is in
tatters, he looks back to the beginning of their relationship and learns
once again whom he fell in love with.
Us is the history of a family, recounted over the course of
what may well be their final weeks together. It's a comedy about the
demands of living together, about parenthood, about the relationship
between reason and emotion, art and science, parents and children,
middle-age and youth.
about book:
The Narrow Road to the Deep North is a love story unfolding over half a century between a doctor and his uncle’s wife.
Taking its title from one of the most famous books in Japanese
literature, written by the great haiku poet Basho, Flanagan’s novel has
as its heart one of the most infamous episodes of Japanese history, the
construction of the Thailand-Burma Death Railway in World War II.
In the despair of a Japanese POW camp on the Death Railway, surgeon
Dorrigo Evans is haunted by his love affair with his uncle’s young wife
two years earlier. Struggling to save the men under his command from
starvation, from cholera, from beatings, he receives a letter that will
change his life forever.
Not a bad bunch,eh? I know I'm excited to dive in to some of these amazing sounding reads. Plus, I love that four of the authors are American - Go USA!
