The esteemed bibliomaniacs of the Man Booker Prize recently released their 2010 longlist, aka the Man Booker Dozen (there are 13 lolz). If you like to read or would like to read more or pay a manservant to read things to you, this is reliably a good place to pin the proverbial tail on the literary donkey—the winner being less important than the list as a guide to good lit. The panel of judges who selected the 13 is headed by Sir Andrew Motion, who we thought just did a dubstep remix of James Blake, but turns out to be the former Poet Laureate of the United Kingdom. So he is probably more into witch house or Mystery Jets. Regardless! We are cracking on a few of these ourselves (namely Mitchell and Tsiolkas) and can say that if the rest are as interesting, you can't really go wrong. Check the list after the jump and read the judges' comments here.
The Man Booker Prize longlist includes:
Peter Carey Parrot and Olivier in America (Faber and Faber)
Emma Donoghue Room (Pan MacMillan - Picador)
Helen Dunmore The Betrayal (Penguin - Fig Tree)
Damon Galgut In a Strange Room (Grove Atlantic - Atlantic Books)
Howard Jacobson The Finkler Question (Bloomsbury)
Andrea Levy The Long Song (Headline Publishing Group - Headline Review)
Tom McCarthy C (Random House - Jonathan Cape)
David Mitchell The Thousand Autumns of Jacob de Zoet (Hodder & Stoughton - Sceptre)
Lisa Moore February (Random House - Chatto & Windus)
Paul Murray Skippy Dies (Penguin - Hamish Hamilton)
Rose Tremain Trespass (Random House - Chatto & Windus)
Christos Tsiolkas The Slap (Grove Atlantic - Tuskar Rock)
Alan Warner The Stars in the Bright Sky (Random House - Jonathan Cape)