From BBC News: “The winner of the £50,000 award, which honours the best fiction written in English by an author from the UK, Ireland or the Commonwealth, will be named in October. A shortlist of six will be revealed on 8 September.”

The longlist for this year includes nine authors from the UK, two from Ireland, one from South Africa, and one from Canada. There are two former Booker Prize winners featured (Coetzee and Byatt) as well as three first-time novelists. Here is the list:

AS Byatt - The Children’s Book
JM Coetzee - Summertime
Adam Foulds - The Quickening Maze
Sarah Hall - How to paint a dead man
Samantha Harvey - The Wilderness
James Lever - Me Cheeta
Hilary Mantel - Wolf Hall
Simon Mawer - The Glass Room
Ed O’Loughlin - Not Untrue & Not Unkind
James Scudamore - Heliopolis
Colm Toibin - Brooklyn
William Trevor - Love and Summer
Sarah Waters - The Little Stranger

The Booker Prize turns 41 this year. It is quite prestigious and literally insular, as it is usually awarded to a citizen of an island. Last year’s winner Aravind Adiga is a citizen of India, which is not an island. This year I’m interested in James Lever’s debut novel Me Cheeta, the “purported autobiography of a chimpanzee,” and James Scudamore’s Heliopolis, which is about “obsessive, adulterous love for an adoptive sister in a futuristic Brazilian city.”

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