The Man Booker prize 2014 shortlist keeps surprises to a minimum
News: The Man Booker prize shortlist revealed
This was the year the Americans were coming but they weren't the ones we were expecting. Donna Tartt didn't even make it to the longlist, and now the Booker judges have passed over grandees Richard Powers and Siri Hustvedt in favour of Joshua Ferris, the youngest writer on the list, with To Rise Again at a Decent Hour, a black comedy about modern American life both on- and offline; and Karen Joy Fowler, whose cautionary tale We Are All Completely Beside Ourselves looks at first like a traditional family narrative but reveals itself to be something much stranger.
If there were fears of a wipeout, then, this is a measured list, with half the places taken by British authors (the surprise omission here is David Mitchell, whose globetrotting, time-travelling fantasy epic The Bone Clocks looked as though it might be all-conquering). The Commonwealth is represented by Richard Flanagan's bravura novel about the experiences of Australian soldiers in the second world war, The Narrow Road to the Deep North; there's a novel set in the subcontinent in the shape of Neel Mukherjee's The Lives of Others; and two out of the six authors are female, following raised eyebrows when women made up just three of the 13-strong longlist.
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