Just last month The Man Booker Prize for fiction was announced and is now seeing a huge boost in sales as a result. And for good reason, The Man Booker Prize first awarded in 1969, promotes the finest in fiction by rewarding the very best book of the year. And with vetting like that, it only make sense that serious readers would take notice. So, if you're looking for ideas for book club over the next few months, consider this year's winner - or one of the other great titles that made the shortlist:
WINNER:
The Finkler Question by Howard Jacobson
"He should have seen it coming. His life had been one mishap after another. So he should have been prepared for this one..."
Julian Treslove, a professionally unspectacular and disappointed BBC worker, and Sam Finkler, a popular Jewish philosopher, writer and television personality, are old school friends. Despite a prickly relationship and very different lives, they've never quite lost touch with each other - or with their former teacher, Libor Sevick, a Czechoslovakian always more concerned with the wider world than with exam results.
Now, both Libor and Finkler are recently widowed, and with Treslove, his chequered and unsuccessful record with women rendering him an honorary third widower, they dine at Libor's grand, central London apartment.
It's a sweetly painful evening of reminiscence in which all three remove themselves to a time before they had loved and lost; a time before they had fathered children, before the devastation of separations, before they had prized anything greatly enough to fear the loss of it. Better, perhaps, to go through life without knowing happiness at all because that way you had less to mourn? Treslove finds he has tears enough for the unbearable sadness of both his friends' losses.
And it's that very evening, at exactly 11:30pm, as Treslove hesitates a moment outside the window of the oldest violin dealer in the country as he walks home, that he is attacked. After this, his whole sense of who and what he is will slowly and ineluctably change.
The Finkler Question is a scorching story of exclusion and belonging, justice and love, aging, wisdom and humanity. Funny, furious, unflinching, this extraordinary novel shows one of our finest writers at his brilliant best.
SHORTLIST:
Parrot and Olivier in America by Peter Carey
Room by Emma Donoghue
In a Strange Room by Damon Galgut The Long Song by Andrea Levy
C by Tom McCarthy
-- Dana Barrett, Contributing Editor
