100 books that defined the noughties

Zadie Smith

Zadie, Nigella, Steig and, of course, the boy wizard. The decade has seen publishing phenomenons like no other, but which books, for better or worse, have summed up the noughties?

By Brian MacArthur

Never in the history of bookselling has there been such a phenomenon as Harry Potter; JK Rowling’s series sold in tens of millions and appealed to adults as well as children. The great success of the British book trade this decade was the Richard & Judy Book Club. It ran in the late afternoon on Channel 4, and made instant bestsellers of Victoria Hislop, Audrey Niffenegger and Zoë Heller, among others. The 100 titles they selected sold 30 million copies.

A decade defined in Britain by Tony Blair is represented in this list by two revealing books about the making of New Labour and the rivalries, quarrels and often poisonous relationships among the leading personalities – Cherie Blair’s memoir and Alastair Campbell’s diaries.

Across the world, it was a decade defined in blood by al-Qaeda and the 9/11 attacks on America, which precipitated the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq – see books by Rajiv Chandrasekaran, Ed Husain, Ahmed Rashid and Khaled Hosseini.

It was also the decade of often tawdry celebrities, such as Russell Brand and Ashley Cole, and those, such as Katie Price, who didn’t even pretend to write their own books. Alan Hollinghurst won the Man Booker Prize for an explicitly gay novel; Ian McEwan rose above his rivals as the country’s pre-eminent literary novelist; and a black man became president of the United States – and wrote two bestsellers.

Click here to read the rest of this story

Books for giving: fiction

Inside the Arctic Circle: John Burnside's A Summer of Drowning 'brings an eerie glow to the far north'. Photograph: Farrell Grehan/Corbis

   A rich year for novels

By Justine Jordan

After a rich year for fiction, the novel most likely to be placed under the Christmas tree will surely be Julian Barnes’s Booker winner, The Sense of an Ending (Jonathan Cape, £12.99). A meditation on memory and regret slyly conveyed through the unreliable voice of a complacent man whose past gives him a nasty surprise, it’s slim enough to gobble at a sitting and slips down with deceptive ease, but leaves plenty to ponder in its wake. The hardback is also a thing of beauty in its own right.

Also small but perfectly wrought, At Last by Edward St Aubyn (Picador, £16.99) is the fifth and final volume in his series about abuse, addiction and other bad behaviours among the English upper classes. It’s savagely funny stuff, and a fitting conclusion to a saga that’s been one of the literary highlights of our time. Alan Hollinghurst teased out the literary establishment’s path through the 20th century in The Stranger’s Child (Picador, £20), elegantly unpicking myths and customs of Englishness as he traces the secret life and afterglow of a country house and a Georgian poem.

For more rambunctious fare, turn to Carol Birch’s Jamrach’s Menagerie (Canongate, £7.99), the most irrepressible read of the year. A young boy is plucked from the streets of 19th-century Wapping and launched on the high seas, joining a quest to capture and bring back a komodo dragon. His story is full of wonder, peril and discovery. Animals also cavort through the picaresque Orange winner, The Tiger’s Wife (Phoenix, £7.99) by Téa Obreht. Through a mixture of folklore and autobiography, she paints a vivid portrait of Yugoslavia’s history and the Balkan wars.

This year saw several fine novels that opened on to parallel dimensions, including the much-anticipated 1Q84 (Harvill Secker, £20 & £14.99) by Haruki Murakami (which in two volumes means double the wrapping). There are cults, conspiracies and lost lovers aplenty in this vast labyrinth of a novel, in which the parallel universe is lit by a second moon. Beautifully strange, too, is John Burnside’s A Summer of Drowning (Jonathan Cape, £16.99), now on the Costa shortlist.

…read more

Green Carnation prize shortlist snubs famous gay writers

The Green Carnation prize shortlist

Alan Hollinghurst, Ali Smith and Philip Hensher all passed over in shortlist for LGBT writing award.

By Alison Flood

An eclectic mix of thriller, science fiction, memoir and short stories makes up the shortlist for the UK’s first literary award celebrating the very best in lesbian and gay writing – but major names including Philip Hensher, Alan Hollinghurst and Ali Smith have all failed to make the cut.

The Green Carnation prize launched last year as an award for gay male writers, but has expanded this year to encompass lesbian, transgender and bisexual authors as well. It is intended, says chair of judges Simon Savidge, to “celebrate LGBT authors and give voice to those who might be less well known” as well as to push the authors forward “in what some believe is an industry dominated by straight white writers”, and is for the best book by a LGBT author – not necessarily about a LGBT topic.

This year’s shortlist, chosen by journalist and book blogger Savidge and a panel of judges including the authors Stella Duffy and Paul Magrs, ranges from Colm Tóibín’s acclaimed short story collection The Empty Family to Patricia Duncker’s thriller The Strange Case of the Composer and His Judge, also featuring Bob Smith’s time-travelling novel Remembrance of Things I Forgot, Zoe Strachan’s novel of unrequited passion Ever Fallen in Love, Catherine Hall’s tale of a brilliant young Cambridge mathematician who moves to an unfriendly Lake District village The Proof of Love and the poet Jackie Kay’s memoir Red Dust Road.

Hollinghurst, Smith and Hensher – all overlooked for the Man Booker prize shortlist as well – were not shortlisted for the Green Carnation prize. Savidge admitted this could be seen as controversial, but was adamant that “there are some very exciting authors [on our list] who are under the radar and who have written better books”.

…read more

Alan Hollinghurst puts Booker snub behind him with Galaxy triumph

Alan Hollinghurst. Photograph: Elisabetta Villa/Getty Images

Having been a shock omission from the Booker prize shortlist, The Stranger’s Child author declared author of the year.

By Alison Flood

He was overlooked by the Booker judges last month, but the book trade has spoken and named Alan Hollinghurst its “author of the year” for his novel The Stranger’s Child.

An academy of 750 book industry experts voted for Hollinghurst as their writer of the year, ahead of Booker winner Julian Barnes and his short novel A Sense of An Ending and Carol Birch’s Booker-shortlisted Jamrach’s Menagerie. Hollinghurst, who failed to make the final Booker cut for his novel about two families, ranging from 1913 to 2008, also beat poet laureate Carol Ann Duffy’s new collection The Bees.

His win was announced at the Galaxy National Book awards on Friday evening and reflects, said the prize’s organisers, “the acclaim for Hollinghurst’s novel and the support from many in the industry who were dismayed to see it omitted from the Man Booker shortlist last month”.

“It’s fantastic that he won. It would have been ridiculous if he had gone the year without winning a major award for that title, so it is wonderful he has been recognised,” said Jon Howells from Waterstone’s, which sponsored the author of the year prize. “Everyone was surprised and disappointed that he wasn’t on the Booker shortlist … Everyone felt it was the one glaring omission so it is good he is getting this. It is the book trade saying, this is our book of the year.”

Hollinghurst, who won the Booker in 2004 for The Line of Beauty, said that “in a year when so many exceptional books have been published” he was “especially thrilled to be named the Waterstone’s UK Author of the Year”.

…read more

Hollinghurst makes Galaxy Book Awards shortlist

Buy this

17.10.11 | Charlotte Williams

Alan Hollinghurst, whose novel The Stranger’s Child was a surprise omission from the Man Booker shortlist this year, has been shortlisted for an award at the Galaxy National Book Awards 2011, with works by Ian Rankin and Keith Richards also in the running within the 11 categories.

Hollinghurst is up against Man Booker-shortlisted Julian Barnes and Carol Birch, as well as poet laureate Carol Ann Duffy, Anthony Horowitz, and Andrea Levy in the Waterstone’s UK Author of the Year category.

The New Writer of the Year could be won by Stephen Kelman with Pigeon English (Bloomsbury) or Snowdrops by A D Miller (Atlantic Books), both on the Man Booker shortlist this year, with Sarah Winman’s When God was a Rabbit (Headline Review), Rivers of London by Ben Aaronovitch (Gollancz), Grace Williams Says it Loud by Emma Henderson (Sceptre) and S J Watson’s Before I Go to Sleep (Doubleday) also in the running.

 

...read more

Stella Rimington: ‘Weirder people than me have chaired the Booker’

'It's pathetic that so-called literary critics are abusing my judges and me' … Stella Rimington. Photograph: Linda Nylind for the Guardian

Since Stella Rimington and her fellow Man Booker prize judges announced their shortlist, they have been savaged by the literary establishment. Here the former MI5 chief turned thriller writer bites back.

By Stuart Jeffries

‘What I cannot tolerate is personal abuse,” says Dame Stella Rimington, fixing me with the piercing green eyes that made Soviet double agent Oleg Gordievsky come over all unnecessary during the cold war.

The former MI5 chief turned spy-thriller writer and Man Booker prize jury chairman who, for the last hour, has been a study in question-deflating diplomacy, is angry. “As somebody interested in literary criticism [her degree from Edinburgh was in English literature], it’s pathetic that so-called literary critics are abusing my judges and me. They live in such an insular world they can’t stand their domain being intruded upon.”

It’s hard to understand why she’s so cross – surely hissed denunciations, counter-denunciations and deals done behind closed doors during her 40-year career as a spy were ideal training for judging Britain’s leading literary prize. And surely the media flaying of Booker judges’ credentials is such an annual ritual that no one with a thick skin would be troubled by it.

Rimington is responding to headlines such as: “This year’s Booker judges don’t inspire confidence” and “Booker prize crisis”. The furore started last month when she announced the shortlist of six for the Booker, whose winner will be announced on 18 October. What kind of barbarians, critics fumed, could have omitted Alan Hollinghurst’s The Stranger’s Child? It was the critics’ favourite and, more significantly, William Hill’s. What was she thinking of?

“We didn’t choose it,” shrugs Rimington. “I got called homophobic for not choosing Hollinghurst and Philip Hensher [whose King of the Badgers also didn't make the cut]. I didn’t know Hensher was homosexual and if I had, it wouldn’t have made any difference.”

Rimington was savaged thus by New Statesman’s lead fiction reviewer, Leo Robson: “An able and intelligent woman – but you wouldn’t ask John Bayley to be a consultant on Spooks. And Rimington’s status as a novelist doesn’t much help matters. Do we really believe that the author of Secret Asset would have recognised the virtues of, say, Midnight’s Children or Life and Times of Michael K or How Late it Was, How Late?”

…read more

Booker prize 2011 shortlist drops Hollinghurst in favour of first-timers

Buy this

Two debut novelists have made the final six in contention for the award, ahead of widely-tipped former winner

By Alison Flood

Alan Hollinghurst’s highly-praised novel The Stranger’s Child has missed out on a place on the Man Booker prize shortlist, with the former Booker winner trumped by two debut novelists.

One of the favourites to take this year’s award, Hollinghurst’s story of a bisexual poet killed during the first world war, was passed over by the judges. The panel, headed by former MI5 director Dame Stella Rimington, preferred Guardian First Book Award-longlisted Stephen Kelman’s Pigeon English, inspired by the murder of Damilola Taylor and written in the voice of a Ghanaian 11-year-old, and former journalist-turned-debut novelist AD Miller’s crime story set in Moscow, Snowdrops.

They also gave Julian Barnes, who has been shortlisted three times for the Booker but never won it, a fourth chance, this time for his 150-page novella The Sense of an Ending, about a middle-aged man looking back at his student days. Although he has described the Booker as “posh bingo” in the past, Barnes has been William Hill’s 3/1 favourite to win the prize, ahead of Hollinghurst at 5/1 and Carol Birch’s Jamrach’s Menagerie and Miller’s Snowdrops, both at 7/1. Birch’s 11th novel, a 19th century-set story of a doomed expedition to the South Pacific to capture a “dragon”, also made the shortlist.

“Inevitably it was hard to whittle down the longlist to six titles,” said Rimington. “We were sorry to lose some great books. But, when push came to shove, we quickly agreed that these six very different titles were the best.”

…read more

Back to work: The books you, er, read

Of course, you'll have read the latest novel by Alan Hollinghurst.

You’ve been away but never quite got round to reading those Booker short listed novels? Here’s a quick guide to make you appear supremely well-read

By John Crace

The biggest news over the summer was the publication of the Man Booker prize long list of 13 novels. While no one will get too excited about the Booker until the short list is announced next Tuesday, the long list does tell you which fancied books are out of the running. Philip Hensher’s King of the Badgers, Graham Swift’s Wish You Were Here and Edward St Aubyn’s At Last, all either a past winner or short listed for previous books, were non-starters. St Aubyn’s non-appearance was a particular surprise as almost every reviewer had suggested he was a short list certainty for the fifth volume of his Melrose saga of aristocratic angst and abuse.

There are three big names still in the running: Sebastian Barry‘s On Cannaan’s Side; Alan Hollinghurst‘s The Stranger’s Child; and Julian Barnes‘s The Sense of an Ending, all of which are worth a read.

But if you took them to the beach and never quite made it past the opening paragraph, here’s what to say:

...read more

The Stranger’s Child leads the way in Booker sales

Alan_hollinghurst

04.08.11 | Philip Stone

Man Booker Prize bookies favourite Alan Hollinghurst is proving the most popular of the longlisted titles among the book buying public.

The British novelist’s The Stranger’s Child (Picador) was comfortably the bestselling Booker longlistee in the week the longlist was announced (ending 30th July), selling 2,143 copies across all print editions. Sebastian Barry’s On Canaan’s Side (Faber) and Stephen Kelman’s Pigeon English (Bloomsbury) were the only other titles nominated for the £50,000 prize to sell more than 500 copies last week.

…read more

Trade picks Man Booker frontrunners

28.07.11 | Katie Allen, Charlotte Williams and Philip Stone

Click to buy

Julian Barnes, Sebastian Barry and bookies favourite Alan Hollinghurst are seen by the trade as the Man Booker Prize for Fiction frontrunners after the longlist was revealed on Tuesday (26th July).

The indie-heavy list has attracted general approval, with nine out of the 13 titles from independent houses contending for the £50,000 prize. Bookmaker William Hill predicted Alan Hollinghurst to win for a second time with The Stranger’s Child (Picador), offering odds of 5/1.

Ladbrokes yesterday (27th July) installed D J Taylor as its 4/1 favourite for Derby Day (Chatto). Stephen Kelman’s Pigeon English (Bloomsbury) is second favourite at 5/1 with Hollinghurst third at 6/1 along with Julian Barnes’ The Sense of an Ending (Jonathan Cape).

...read more