The Longlist for the 2007 Man Booker Prize has been announced.
Darkmans by Nicola Barker (Fourth Estate)
Self Help by Edward Docx (Picador)
The Gift Of Rain by Tan Twan Eng (Myrmidon)
The Gathering by Anne Enright (Jonathan Cape)
The Reluctant Fundamentalist by Mohsin Hamid (Hamish Hamilton)
The Welsh Girl by Peter Ho Davies (Sceptre)
Mister Pip by Lloyd Jones (John Murray)
Gifted by Nikita Lalwani (Viking)
On Chesil Beach by Ian McEwan, (Jonathan Cape)
What Was Lost by Catherine O'Flynn (Tindal Street)
Consolation by Michael Redhill (William Heinemann)
Animal's People by Indra Sinha (Simon & Schuster)
Winnie & Wolf by AN Wilson (Hutchinson)
I haven't been paying a lot of attention to this over the past twelve months, so most of the books here are completely new to me. From coverage that I have seen, you'd have to expect that Jones and McEwan will be vying hard for the final prize.
But I am starting to wonder about the need for the longlist. The concept was first introduced to the Man Booker Prize in 2001. Since then the number of books on the longlist has looked like this:
2001 - 18
2002 - 14
2003 - 17
2004 - 22
2005 - 17
2006 - 19
And this year we are down to 13. Surely there were more books than that that deserved to be in the final reckoning; none from the Miles Franklin Award shortlist you'll notice. I'll grant you that 22 in 2004 was a tad high, but 13? It'll be interesting to look through this list a little more thoroughly. There's a few lines of thought I'd like to follow up.
