From the Booker, to the future

ONE of the oddities of the Man Booker Prize is that books can be longlisted and even shortlisted before they are published.

Peter Carey wins the first of his two Booker prizes, for Oscar and Lucinda in 1988.

ONE of the oddities of the Man Booker Prize is that books can be longlisted and even shortlisted before they are published.

This year’s prize is open to any English-language novel published in Britain between October 1 last year and September 30 this year. The longlist, reported here last week, was announced on July 23 and the shortlist will be revealed on September 9. David Mitchell’s The Bone Clocks and Howard Jacobson’s J, to take a couple of the fancied works on the longlist, are not published until the start of September. I imagine this is a little frustrating for booksellers. It also means we have to make some assumptions about big-name authors who were omitted from the longlist. Ian McEwan’s The Children Act is also published at the start of September. As a previous Booker winner, for Amsterdam in 1998, he would have been considered automatically by this year’s judges. Martin Amis’s The Zone of Interest is another September release.

Australian author Richard Flanagan is longlisted for The Narrow Road to the Deep North, published here last September but only recently released in Britain. The novel that won this year’s Miles Franklin Literary Award, for which Flanagan was strongly tipped, Evie Wyld’s All the Birds, Singing, was published in Britain in mid-2013, so would have been eligible for last year’s Booker.

It was while checking such dates last week that I thought it would be a good idea to flag some of the big books due to be published between now and the end of the year. It looks like a particularly strong second half for publishing, at least in terms of the books that will land in bookstores (whether they will also fly out of bookstores I cannot say, though some are easier to predict than others). The following is not an exhaustive list but a sample of what is to come in the next five months.

To stick with fiction for the moment, Peter Carey’s new novel, Amnesia, set mainly in Australia and spanning almost 70 years from World War II to the near-present, will be published on October 14. Carey is one of only three writers to win the Booker twice. Whether he goes head-to-head in next year’s prize with one of the others, Hilary Mantel, will depend on the publication date of the third and final book in her Tudor England trilogy, The Mirror and the Light. Mantel’s novel is expected some time next year, but in the interim she will publish in October a short story collection punchily titled The Assassination of Margaret Thatcher. The book is said to comprise 10 stories in “contemporary settings’’ about the former British PM, who died last year. Mantel has admitted a key aspect of the book came to her while she was off her face on drugs — though it was all above board as she was in hospital at the time recovering from surgery.

Also turning his hand to the short form is Christos Tsiolkas, who has a collection of stories, Merciless Gods, due in November. Publisher Allen & Unwin says the stories are about “love, sex, death, family, friendship, betrayal, tenderness, sacrifice and revelation’’, so it sounds like the author of The Slap is on familiar ground! Also in November and also from A&U, is Springtime: A Ghost Story, a novella by Miles Franklin winner Michelle de Kretser. Ghosts of the past feature in Ben Elton’s November release Time and Time Again, a time-travelling what-if? novel centred on an attempt to prevent World War I. I enjoyed Elton’s previous historical fiction, Two Brothers.

The multi-talented Sonya Hartnett will publish a new novel, Golden Boys, later this month. Fans of Haruki Murakami will need no spur to read his new one, Colorless Tusukuro Tazaki and His Years of Pilgrimage, which is due soon. Under the Skin, the creepy sort-of-sci-fi 2000 novel by Australia-reared Dutch writer Michel Faber is one of my favourite books of the past 15 years. To my mind, it’s also a plea for compassion to our fellow animals on a par with anything written by Peter Singer. Faber returns in November with a new novel, The Book of Strange New Things. Richard Ford’s best-loved character, Frank Bascombe, is back in November in Let Me Be Frank With You. Irish master Colm Toibin has a new novel, Nora Webster, in October.

Of course, there’s more to life than losing yourself in invented lives and imagined worlds and there are some massive nonfiction releases looming, headed by Julia Gillard’s political memoir, My Story, in October. Though I reckon publisher Random House may want to tweak the bit of the blurb that says the author will be “refreshingly honest’’. One of Gillard’s predecessors in the Lodge, John Howard, also has a new book in October, The Menzies Era, which chronicles Australia’s longest unbroken period of government by one side of politics. It wouldn’t be Christmas without Peter FitzSimons and this year he tackles perhaps his heftiest subject yet in Gallipoli.

Rob Mundle will continue his maritime campaign with The First Fleet, the remarkable Thomas Keneally will publish the third volume of Australians, taking the national story up to Vietnam, and David Day will load the whole box and dice into one volume in The Making of Australia. There will also be memoirs by cricket great Allan Border, music guru Ian Molly Meldrum and comic genius John Cleese. And my colleague Graeme Blundell is due to publish his book on Bert Newton, which I mention because it will be good, not because he sits right behind me, reads too much crime fiction and could shiv me before I knew what was happening.

Quote of the week: “I’ve been to places where there is a poet laureate for every ZIP code. The country is crawling with them. I think it’s out of control.” Former American poet laureate Billy Collins, discussing the proliferation of such positions in the US, probably didn’t mean to make poets sound like feral cats.