Bookerprisen 2011 – en utfordring!

Jeg er visst i skikkelig litteraturmodus her på morran jeg – kanskje er det håpet om mange timers lesing i løpet av høstferien som melder seg? 🙂

I alle fall fant jeg frem til en litteraturblogg med tittelen «Migrating Coconuts» om har en utfordring til sine lesere – å lese og skrive om de nominerte bøkene til Bookerprisen 2011 før den avgjøres den 18. oktober!

Bookerprisen (engelsk navn: «Booker Prize for Fiction» og «Man Booker Prize») blir årlig utdelt til den beste romanen skrevet av en innbygger i Samveldet eller i Irland. Prisen ble innstiftet av bokhandlerkjeden Booker plc i 1968. For å bevare prisens eksklusivitet velger man ut jurymedlemmer blant kritikere, forfattere og akademikere. Siden 2002 har prisen også blitt omtalt som «Man Booker Prize» for å reflektere at prisen blir sponset av et investeringsselskap, Man Group plc. (Wikipedia)

Les mer på themanbookerprize.com

Er det ambisiøst å tro at jeg klarer å både lese og skrive om 6 bøker på 18 dager? (Dette innlegget ble skrevet 01.oktober) Vel.. får jeg roen over meg kan jeg vanligvis lese en bok på et par dager, så det burde gå greit. Bokomtalene er det litt verre med, for de bruker jeg som oftest ganske lang tid på å skrive. Det spørs om jeg får gjøre en «kortversjon» 🙂 Uansett, alle bøkene er lastet ned til iPaden (Kindle) og jeg er klar!!

Nedenfor finner du mer informasjon om bøkene

De nominerte bøkene er:

Julian Barnes The Sense of an Ending (Jonathan Cape – Random House)

Tony Webster and his clique first met Adrian Finn at school. Sex-hungry and book-hungry, they would navigate the girl-less sixth form together, trading in affectations, in-jokes, rumour and wit. Maybe Adrian was a little more serious than the others, certainly more intelligent, but they all swore to stay friends for life. Now Tony is in middle age. He’s had a career and a single marriage, a calm divorce. He’s certainly never tried to hurt anybody. Memory, though, is imperfect. It can always throw up surprises, as a lawyer’s letter is about to prove. The Sense of an Ending is the story of one man coming to terms with the mutable past. Laced with trademark precision, dexterity and insight, it is the work of one of the world’s most distinguished writers.

 

Carol Birch Jamrach’s Menagerie (Canongate Books)

‘I was born twice. First in a wooden room that jutted out over the black water of the Thames, and then again eight years later in the Highway, when the tiger took me in his mouth and everything truly began.’ 1857. Jaffy Brown is running along a street in London’s East End when he comes face to face with an escaped circus animal. Plucked from the jaws of death by Mr Jamrach – explorer, entrepreneur and collector of the world’s strangest creatures – the two strike up a friendship. Before he knows it, Jaffy finds himself on board a ship bound for the Dutch East Indies, on an unusual commission for Mr Jamrach. His journey – if he survives it – will push faith, love and friendship to their utmost limits.
Patrick deWitt The Sisters Brothers (Granta)

From the author of the acclaimed Ablutions, this dazzlingly original novel is a darkly funny, offbeat western about a reluctant assassin and his murderous brother. Oregon, 1851. Eli and Charlie Sisters, notorious professional killers, are on their way to California to kill a man named Hermann Kermit Warm. On the way, the brothers have a series of unsettling and violent experiences in the Darwinian landscape of Gold Rush America. Charlie makes money and kills anyone who stands in his way; Eli doubts his vocation and falls in love. And they bicker a lot. Then they get to California, and discover that Warm is an inventor who has come up with a magical formula, which could make all of them very rich. What happens next is utterly gripping, strange and sad. Told in deWitt’s darkly comic and arresting style, The Sisters Brothers is the kind of western the Coen Brothers might write – stark, unsettling and with a keen eye for the perversity of human motivation. Like his debut novel Ablutions, it is a novel about the things you tell yourself in order to be able to continue to live the life you find yourself in, and what happens when those stories no longer work. It is an inventive and strange and beautifully controlled piece of fiction and displays an exciting expansion of Dewitt’s range.
Esi Edugyan Half Blood Blues (Serpent’s Tail)

‘Chip told us not to go out. Said, don’t you boys tempt the devil. But it been one brawl of a night, I tell you…’ The aftermath of the fall of Paris, 1940. Hieronymous Falk, a rising star on the cabaret scene, was arrested in a cafe and never heard from again. He was twenty years old. He was a German citizen. And he was black. Fifty years later, Sid, Hiero’s bandmate and the only witness that day, is going back to Berlin. Persuaded by his old friend Chip, Sid discovers there’s more to the journey than he thought when Chip shares a mysterious letter, bringing to the surface secrets buried since Hiero’s fate was settled. In Half Blood Blues, Esi Edugyan weaves the horror of betrayal, the burden of loyalty and the possibility that, if you don’t tell your story, someone else might tell it for you. And they just might tell it wrong…
Stephen Kelman Pigeon English (Bloomsbury)

Newly arrived from Ghana with his mother and older sister, eleven-year-old Harrison Opoku lives on the ninth floor of a block of flats on an inner-city housing estate. The second best runner in the whole of Year 7, Harri races through his new life in his personalised trainers – the Adidas stripes drawn on with marker pen – blissfully unaware of the very real threat all around him. With equal fascination for the local gang – the Dell Farm Crew – and the pigeon who visits his balcony, Harri absorbs the many strange elements of his new life in England: watching, listening, and learning the tricks of inner-city survival. But when a boy is knifed to death on the high street and a police appeal for witnesses draws only silence, Harri decides to start a murder investigation of his own. In doing so, he unwittingly endangers the fragile web his mother has spun around her family to try and keep them safe. A story of innocence and experience, hope and harsh reality, Pigeon English is a spellbinding portrayal of a boy balancing on the edge of manhood and of the forces around him that try to shape the way he falls.
A.D. Miller Snowdrops

«A.D. Miller’s Snowdrops is a riveting psychological drama that unfolds over the course of one Moscow winter, as a young Englishman’s moral compass is spun by the seductive opportunities revealed to him by a new Russia: a land of hedonism and desperation, corruption and kindness, magical dachas and debauched nightclubs; a place where secrets – and corpses – come to light only when the deep snows start to thaw… Snowdrops is a chilling story of love and moral freefall: of the corruption, by a corrupt society, of a corruptible man. It is taut, intense and has a momentum as irresistible to the reader as the moral danger that first enchants, then threatens to overwhelm, its narrator.»