The United Kingdom Man Booker Prize for Fiction...

The Longlist has been announced AND it includes, 

for the first time, 

FOUR AMERICAN writers!  

Now of course your Merrick Library has them all.

The rest, we await US publication, but we have them on order. 

So here they are with links to the titles we already have...

To Rise Again at a Decent Hour, by Joshua Ferris - Paul O'Rourke is a man made of contradictions: he loves the world, but doesn't know how to live in it. He's a Luddite addicted to his iPhone, a dentist with a nicotine habit, a rabid Red Sox fan devastated by their victories, and an atheist not quite willing to let go of God. At once laugh-out-loud funny about the absurdities of the modern world, and indelibly profound about the eternal questions of the meaning of life, love and truth, is a deeply moving and constantly surprising tour de force. 


Orfeo, by Richard Powers - Powers tells the story of a man journeying into his past as he desperately flees the present. Composer Peter Els opens the door one evening to find the police on his doorstep. His home microbiology lab, the latest experiment in his lifelong attempt to find music in surprising patterns, has aroused the suspicions of Homeland Security. Panicked by the raid, Els turns fugitive. As an Internet-fueled hysteria erupts, Els - the "Bioterrorist Bach"—pays a final visit to the people he loves, those who shaped his musical journey. The result is a novel that soars in spirit and language by a writer who “may be America’s most ambitious novelist”.

 We Are All Completely Beside Ourselves - by Karen Joy Fowler  Meet the Cooke family. Our narrator is Rosemary Cooke. As a child, she never stopped talking; as a young woman, she has wrapped herself in silence: the silence of intentional forgetting, of protective cover. Something happened, something so awful she has buried it in the recesses of her mind. 
Her adored older brother is a fugitive and her once lively mother is a shell of her former self, her clever and imperious father now a distant, brooding man.  And her sister Fern’s is a fate the family, in all their innocence, could never have imagined.

   

The Blazing World, by Siri Hustvedt - The provocative story of artist Harriet Burden, who, after years of having her work ignored, ignites an explosive scandal in New York’s art world when she recruits three young men to present her creations as their own. Yet when the shows succeed and Burden steps forward for her triumphant reveal, she is betrayed.  An intricately conceived, diabolical puzzle presented as a collection of texts, including Harriet’s journals, assembled after her death, this “glorious mashup of storytelling and scholarship” (San Francisco Chronicle) unfolds from multiple perspectives as Harriet’s critics, fans, family, and others offer their own conflicting opinions of where the truth lies.