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.
Ahead of the Booker shortlist announcement this week, we’ve released these two exclusive videos of Booker longlisted author Sam Thompson. Filmed in his office in Oxford, he discusses his debut novel Communion Town, the definition of a city and the books that inspired him. Also shown are Sam’s drawings, which became the novel’s chapter-headings and capture perfectly the spirit of the book.
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)
Hilary Mantel is to be the subject of a BBC2 Culture Show Special, to be aired September 17th at 8pm
See below for the press release from the BBC
The Culture Show gains exclusive access to the life and work of Hilary Mantel as she writes The Mirror And The Light, the sequel to her Booker prize-winning novel Wolf Hall.
Mantel’s extraordinarily wide range of work stretches from childhood memoir to Irish giants; from the influence of the Roman Catholic Church to the growth of fundamentalism in Saudi Arabia and from the French Revolution to the Tudor court of Henry VIII.
It’s that time of year again when publishers up and down the land get excited about being on the Booker Long-list.
The booker prize, as I’m sure you know, is a Pretty Big Deal. The winning books almost always go on to be huge commercial successes.
In recent years, if memory serves from the research I did when our own ‘Wolf Hall’ won, paperback editions go on to sell over 80,000 copies (at the least) and over a million in the case of ‘The Life of Pi’.
