4th Estate

We are very proud of our three authors Hilary Mantel, Nicola Barker and Sam Thompson who have been longlisted for the 2012 Man Booker Prize. Mantel has been longlisted for Bring up the Bodies, the sequel to the 2009 Booker-winning Wolf Hall, while Nicola Barker’s The Yips was chosen- topping off an incredible set of reviews for a novel that has been described as ‘more consistently surprising than War and Peace, at least.’ (Sunday Telegraph) We were incredibly pleased to see deserved recognition shown to Sam Thompson’s debut Communion Town. This description in the Telegraph encapsulates his talents: ‘Turning the pages of Communion Town you become aware that here is a new writer working out what he can do, and realising that he can do anything.’

In the last four years alone Fourth Estate authors have won the Nobel Prize, the Booker Prize, the Orange Prize, the Samuel Johnson Prize and the Guardian First Book Award (twice) – not to mention any of the foreign prizes that our books have won. We are pleased to see that our authors and their books are once again being celebrated and we hope you’ll read every one of the longlisted titles.

To celebrate, we’ve made the first chapters of all three of the longlisted books available to download for free. Just follow the links below. And keep following us on Twitter in the next few weeks for some very special Booker activity.

The Yips, Nicola Barker

Bring Up the Bodies, Hilary Mantel

Communion Town, Sam Thompson