This July is a bumper Man Booker month. As well as the announcement of the 2018 longlist, we also have the results of the Golden Booker vote to look forward to, with members of the public picking their favourite winner from a six-book shortlist spanning the last 50 years. So we thought we’d join in, by asking you to nominate your own favourite winner from the last half-century to be this month’s reading group selection.
I have to admit I initially felt some “franchise fatigue” when the Golden Booker was announced. It perhaps says as much about my relationship with time as it does about the Booker, but it doesn’t seem all that long since the Lost Booker (won by JG Farrell’s Troubles, excluded from competition by a scheduling change in 1970) and the Best of Booker (to mark 40 years of the prize, won by Salman Rushdie’s Midnight’s Children).
I also wondered about the wisdom of having judges select a shortlist first, instead of going straight to a public vote. But as it turns out, they’ve done a fine job. While any list that leaves out JG Farrell is obviously flawed, the six novels in contention are interesting: George Saunders’s Lincoln in the Bardo, Hilary Mantel’s Wolf Hall, Michael Ondaatje’s The English Patient, Penelope Lively’s Moon Tiger and VS Naipaul’s In a Free State. It’s especially pleasing to see Lively as a finalist. Moon Tiger is both one of the finest books of the last 50 years and one of the most consistently underestimated. It’s artistically ambitious, emotionally devastating, hilarious, vivid, surprising, profound; I could throw praise at Lively all day and it wouldn’t be enough.
For more read the full of article at The Guardian
