The Man Booker Prize 2012 Longlist

 The Man Booker has announced its longlist and to find out more

Bring Up the Bodies by Hilary Mantel

The sequel to Hilary Mantel’s 2009 Man Booker Prize winner and New York Times bestseller, Wolf Hall delves into the heart of Tudor history with the downfall of Anne Boleyn. Though he battled for seven years to marry her, Henry is disenchanted with Anne Boleyn. (Novelist Plus)

Communion Town by Sam Thompson

 Every city is made of stories: stories that meet and diverge, stories of the commonplace and the strange, of love and crime, of ghosts and monsters. (Man Booker website)

 

The Garden of Evening Mists by Tan Twan Eng

Malaya, 1949. After studying law at Cambrige and time spent helping to prosecute Japanese war criminals, Yun Ling Teoh, herself the scarred lone survivor of a brutal Japanese wartime camp, seeks solace among the jungle fringed plantations of Northern Malaya where she grew up as a child. (Man Booker website)

 

The Lighthouse by Alison Moore

Futh, a middle-aged, recently separated man stands on the outer deck of a North Sea ferry. He is heading to Germany for a restorative walking holiday, yet he cannot forget his mother’s abandonment of him as a boy and his first trip to Germany with his newly single father. (Man Booker website)

Narcopolis by Jeet Thayil

Shuklaji Street, in late 1970s Old Bombay. In Rashid’s opium room the air is thick with voices and ghosts: Hindu, Muslim, Christian. Here, people say that you introduce only your worst enemy to opium… (Man Booker website)

 

Philida by Andre Brink

The year is 1832 and the Cape is rife with rumours about the liberation of the slaves. Philida made a pact for freedom with Francois Brink, the son of her master, but he has reneged on his promise to set her free. (Man Booker website)

Skios by Michael Frayn

While foundation organizer Nikki falls for a charismatic speaker during a science retreat on a Greek island, her longtime friend, Georgie, finds her plans for a romantic weekend shattered by a temperamental scientist who has lost his senses. (Novelist Plus)

 

Swimming Home by Deborah Levy and introduction  by Tom McCarthy

Swimming Home is a subversive page-turner, a merciless gaze at the insidious harm that depression can have on apparently stable, well-turned-out people. Set in a summer villa, the story is tautly structured, taking place over a single week in which a group of beautiful, flawed tourists in the French Riviera come loose at the seams. (Man Booker website)

 

The Teleportation Accident by Ned Beauman

In the declining Weimar Republic, Egon Loeser works as a stage designer for New Expressionist theatre. His hero is the greatest set designer of the seventeenth century, Adriano Lavicini, who devised the so-called Teleportation Device for the whisking of actors from one scene to another–a miracle, until the thing malfunctioned, causing numerous deaths and perhaps summoning the devil himself.  (Man Booker website)

 

The Unlikely Pilgrimage Of Harold Fry by Rachel Joyce 

 When Harold Fry nips out one morning to post a letter, leaving his wife hoovering upstairs, he has no idea that he is about to walk from one end of the country to the other. He has no hiking boots or map, let alone a compass, waterproof or mobile phone. All he knows is that he must keep walking. To save someone else’s life.