Tag: Man Booker Prize 2013

  • Ruth Rendell & Penelope Lively

    It’s a truism that old age brings a reawakening of childhood memories. For almost every writer, memory is a rich resource, but things get especially interesting when they undergo that memory reboot in their seventies or eighties. At the age of 84 – and 50 years since her debut From Doon with Death – Ruth…

  • The Luminaries, The Goldfinch

    If you’re in the mood for autumnal immersion into a big book, here’s a brace of blockbuster novels – a Booker winner and a long-awaited comeback. The Luminaries by Eleanor Catton is back in stock after publishers Granta reprinted the Booker-winning, 830-page literary novel that doubles up as a homage to Victorian sensation novels. A…

  • The Testament of Mary: Colm Tóibín

    Novels that are barely novels have sometimes managed to win over the Booker Prize judges: Julian Barnes won for The Sense of an Ending a couple of years ago and Penelope Fitzgerald’s Offshore was triumphant in 1979. (Both are excellent, slender novels that are suited to reading in a single sitting.) So perhaps The Testament…