A very happy New Year to you and all you know, from 4th Estate. 2014 was a fantastic year for books, wasn’t it? Or, to borrow the phrase from Andy Miller, it truly was The Year of Reading Dangerously. Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie taught us that We Should All be Feminists, while Lena Dunham told us how she came to be one in Not That Kind of Girl. David Cronenberg put us off our dinner with the fantastic techno-thriller Consumed, but Anna Jones set us back on track with her astonishing debut recipe book A Modern Way to Eat. The phenomenal Sali Hughes taught us all we needed to know about beauty (and all we didn’t know we should) in Pretty Honest: The Straight-Talking Beauty Companion, a guide we should all start referring to daily in the new year. Read more…
In this stunning Booker-longlisted novel, Tash Aw charts the overlapping lives of migrant Malaysian workers, forging lives for themselves in sprawling Shanghai.
Five from 4th Estate: revealing the most interesting corners of the internet, one page at a time. This week listen, watch and read the best things we’ve found online just for you, from us at 4th Estate. Read more…
Here are five online things that we’ve been sharing, discussing, reading and watching this week.
We are absolutely delighted to announce that Bring Up The Bodies has won the 2012 Man Booker Prize, making Hilary Mantel the first woman and the first British author to win it twice.
Sir Peter Stothard, chair of the judges and editor of the Times Literary Supplement, made the announcement last night at London’s Guildhall, and said that this year, the award stood ‘for vitality, for fierce intelligence, and most of all for prose’.
We are proud and thrilled to announce that Hilary Mantel’s ‘Bring Up the Bodies’ has been shortlisted for the 2012 Man Booker Prize. Mantel won the prize in 2009 for the first in her Thomas Cromwell trilogy, ‘Wolf Hall’, with the prize’s chair, James Naughtie, commenting,
‘Hilary Mantel has given us a thoroughly modern novel set in the 16th century. ‘Wolf Hall’ has a vast narrative sweep that gleams on every page with luminous and mesmerising detail.’
I’m dumbstruck by the news that Communion Town has been longlisted for the Man Booker prize. What can you say about such an improbable stroke of good fortune for a first novel, other than repeating words like ‘thrilled’, ‘incredulous’, ‘bamboozled’ and ‘er… what?’ That’s what I’ve been doing since they announced the list. Getting a first book published at all feels like hitting the jackpot, so also catching the eyes of judges in a competition like the Booker is ridiculous, embarrassing bounty – more than any first-time writer could sensibly hope for.
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)
