The Man Booker Prize Long List 2005

The Man Booker Prize Long List Aug 11, 2005:
Independent, The; London (UK)
Telegraph, The; London (UK

'The Harmony Silk Factory' by Tash Aw (Fourth Estate)
In his first novel, Aw weaves the story of Johnny Lim, a cloth merchant, criminal and clandestine Communist in 1940s Malaysia, who rose by nefarious means from obscure peasant origins to become the richest man in the valley. The narrative is conveyed by the voices of Lim's family and friends.

'The Sea' by John Banville (Picador)
Max Morden, an ageing alcoholic, returns to the Irish resort where he spent a memorable childhood holiday 50 years before. Recently bereaved by the loss of his wife, Anna, Morden immerses himself in the memory of the earlier visit to Ballyless as an 11- year-old, when he fell in love with an entire family.

'Arthur & George' by Julian Barnes (Jonathan Cape)
Barnes brings to life the case of George Edali, sentenced to seven years' hard labour as the convicted sender of hate mail to his Indian father and Scottish mother. His cause is taken up by the writer Arthur Conan Doyle, who attempts to clear his name while suffering his own emotional turmoil.

'A Long, Long Way' by Sebastian Barry (Faber & Faber)
It is 1916 and Willie Dunne is a volunteer with the Dublin Fusiliers enduring the brutality of the battlefield in Flanders. On leave in Dublin, he faces the Easter Rising. The son of a Catholic policeman and loyalist, Dunne and fellow Irish soldiers are seen as traitors by nationalists and distrusted by the English.

'Slow Man' by J M Coetzee (Secker & Warburg)
Coetzee has already won the Booker Prize twice, in 1983 and 1999, as well as being awarded the Nobel Prize for literature in 2003. In Slow Man, Paul Rayment has his leg amputated after an accident. He hires a nurse, Marijana, and becomes increasingly drawn to her and her handsome teenage son.

'In The Fold' by Rachel Cusk (Faber & Faber)
In her fifth novel, the award-winning Cusk, named one of Granta's Best of Young British novelists in 2003, deals with marriage, friendship, family and morality. Michael is married to Rebecca, but their partnership is threatened by her self-doubt. He has to look back at his youthful judgements.

'Never Let Me Go' by Kazuo Ishiguro (Faber & Faber)
The children of Hailsham have no parents and are destined to have no children of their own. The sinister truth is that they have been bred as 'donors', eventually to surrender their vital organs. The story is narrated by one of the pupils, Kathy, who has become a carer, who spends her time between 'recovery centres', where she helps donors not to die, but to 'complete'.

'All For Love' by Dan Jacobson (Hamish Hamilton)
Based on the real story of Louise, younger daughter of King Leopold II of Belgium, Jacobson's novel recreates an elopement that scandalised Viennese society at the end of the 19th century. Married to a Hapsburg prince, Princess Louise had an affair with a soldier who claimed to be a Croatian count, Lieutenant Mattachich. They ended up in prison and a madhouse.

'A Short History of Tractors in Ukrainian' by Marina Lewycka (Viking)
Sisters Nadezhda and Vera were brought up in England by their Ukrainian refugee parents, but have not spoken to one another for years. They are reconciled after their mother's death when their father, who is working on a grand history of the tractor, becomes romantically entangled with a pneumatic young blonde woman, who is clearly after his wealth.

'Beyond Black' by Hilary Mantel (Fourth Estate)
Mantel's tenth novel revolves around Alison Hart, a medium from Slough, who tours with her assistant Colette, showcasing her psychic powers to mainly female audiences. Partly inspired by the death of Diana, Princess of Wales, the book takes a wry look at Britain in the 21st century, where the inhabitants of housing estates worry about immigration and Gypsies.

'Saturday' by Ian McEwan (Jonathan Cape)
McEwan's novel is set on 15 February 2003, the day Britain took to the streets of the capital in protest against the impending war in Iraq. But the action is away from the march when neurosurgeon Henry Perowne is in a minor car crash. His encounter with the other driver, Baxter, whom he diagnoses as having Hunting-ton's disease, has fateful consequences.

'The People's Act of Love' by James Meek (Canongate)
Siberia 1919, and the Czech Legion, which fought for the beaten Whites against the Red Army, are stranded in a small village made stranger by the practice of shamanism and a Christian sect led by the enigmatic Balashov. Into this setting Meek brings escaped criminal Samarin and war widow, Anna Petrovna.

'Shalimar The Clown' by Salman Rushdie (Jonathan Cape)
The book opens in LA in 1991, when Maximilian Ophuls, former US ambassador to India, is killed at his illegitimate daughter's house by his Kashmiri Muslim driver, who calls himself Shalimar The Clown. What appears to be a political assassination is revealed to be a passionately personal murder.

'The Accidental' by Ali Smith (Hamish Hamilton)
Smith's first full-length novel, is drawn from Pier Pasolini's film Theorem, starring a youthful Terence Stamp. In the film, the beautiful young man entrances a bourgeois family. In the novel, a young woman, Amber, brings turmoil into the family home of an English literature lecturer.

'On Beauty' by Zadie Smith (Hamish Hamilton)
In her third novel, the author of White Teeth and The Autograph Man tells the story of two academic families, the Belseys and the Kipps, who are brought together despite their differences. Smith's social comedy deals with themes of love, sex, race, class and belief systems.

'This Thing of Darkness' by Harry Thompson (Headline)
In his epic novel, Thompson tells the story of the voyages of the Beagle, its captain Robert Fitzroy and most famous passenger, Charles Darwin. Fitzroy was a devout Christian searching for geological evidence to back up the Old Testament. Darwin, though a minor cleric at the time, had other ideas.

'This is the Country' by William Wall (Hodder & Stoughton)
An Irish teenager is heading for trouble, dabbling with drugs and the criminal underworld. His life is changed when he falls for Pat Baker's sister. When she becomes pregnant, Pat breaks his legs. Set against the backdrop of a gritty, modern Ireland, it is a darkly comic tale of survival against the odds.