Last week, the Booker judges released their longlist. This year, there was a certain amount of grudging admiration for the books they chose, alongside the typical complaints. These mainly centred on the fact that people called David appeared to be almost as well represented as women and better represented than people from Asia. Good points. Curiously, no one pointed out that the longlist wasn't actually that long. I mean: 13 books? That's nothing. Now, this is a long list:
Mark Alder - Son of the Morning (Gollancz)
Louis Armand - Cairo (Equus)
Maurizio Ascari - Faded Letters (Patrician Press)
Edward St Aubyn - Lost For Words (Picador)
Nicholson Baker - Travelling Sprinkler (Serpent's Tail)
Nicola Barker - In the Approaches (Fourth Estate)
Susan Barker - The Incarnations (Doubleday)
Sue Barnard - The Ghostly Father (Crooked Cat Publishing)
Sebastian Barry - The Temporary Gentleman (Faber)
Hannah Beckerman - The Dead Wife's Handbook (Penguin)
Lauren Beukes - Broken Monsters (HarperCollins)
Ned Beauman - Glow (Sceptre)
James Benmore - Dodger of the Dials (Heron books)
Tony Black - The Last Tiger (Cargo Publishing)
Robin Black - Life Drawing (Picador)
Joanna Bolouri: My Year of Sexual Adventures - The List (Quercus)
Joseph Boyden - The Orenda (Oneworld)
SJ Bradley - Brick Mother (Dead Ink)
Carys Bray - A Song For Issy Bradley (Hutchinson)
Jessie Burton - The Miniaturist (Picador)
Noah Cicero - Go To Work and Do Your Job. Care For Your Children. Pay Your Bills. Obey The Law. Buy Products. (Eraserhead Press)
Jennifer Clement - Prayers For The Stolen (Hogarth)
Julian Cope - 131 (Faber)
Mark Z Danielewski - The Fifty Year Sword (Cargo)
Rene Denfeld - The Enchanted (W&N)
Lucy Duggan - Tendrils (Peer Press)
PS Duffy - The Cartographer of No Man's Land (Liveright)
Doug Durst & JJ Abrams - S (Canongate)
Dave Eggers - The Circle (Hamish Hamilton)
Rhian Elizabeth - Six Pounds Eight Ounces (Seren)
Juliet Escoria - Black Cloud (Civil Coping Mechanisms)
Roopa Farooki - The Good Children (Tinder Press)
Karen Fielding - American Sycamore (Seren Books)
Richard Flanagan - Narrow Road to the Deep North (Chatto & Windus)
Matthew Francis - The Book Of The Needle (Cinnamon Press)
Anna Freeman - The Fair Fight (W&N)
Damon Galgut - Arctic Summer (Atlantic)
Maggie Gee - Virginia Woolf in Manhattan (Telegram)
Lesley Glaister - Little Egypt (Salt)
Bradley Greenburg - When Lilacs Last in the Dooryard Bloomed (Sandstone)
Nicola Griffith - Hild (Farrar Strauss and Giroux)
Xiaolu Guo - I Am China (Chatto & Windus)
Nick Harkaway - Tigerman (William Heinemann)
Emma Healey - Elizabeth Is Missing (Viking)
J Paul Henderson - Last Bus To Coffeeville (No Exit Press)
Charlie Hill - Books (Tindal Street)
Carly Holmes - The Scrapbook (Parthian)
Anna Hope - Wake (Doubleday)
Kerry Hudson - Thirst (Chatto & Windus)
Siri Hustvedt - The Blazing World (Sceptre)
Heidi James - Wounding (Bluemoose)
Cynan Jones - The Dig (Granta)
Gabriel Josipovici - Hotel Andromeda (Carcanet Press)
Meena Kandasamy - The Gypsy Goddess (Atlantic)
Balraj Khanna - Indian Magic (Hoperoad)
Paul Kingsnorth - The Wake (Unbound)
Charles Lambert - With a Zero at Its Heart (The Friday Project)
Malcolm Mackay - The Sudden Arrival of Violence (Pan Macmillan)
Anneliese Mackintosh - Any Other Mouth (Freight Books)
Iain Maloney - First time Solo (Freight books)
Valerie Martin - The Ghost Of Mary Celeste (W&N)
Laura McBride - We Are Called To Rise (Simon & Schuster)
Darragh McKeon - All That Is Solid Melts Into Air (Viking)
Grace McCleen - The Professor Of Poetry (Sceptre)
David Mitchell - The Bone Clocks (Sceptre)
Lisa Moore - Caught (Chatto and Windus)
Neel Mukherjee - The Lives Of Others (Chatto & Windus)
Benjamin Myers - Beastings (Bluemoose)
Michael Nath - British Story (Route Publishing)
Claire North - The First Fifteen Lives of Harry August (Orbit)
Jenny Offill - Dept. Of Speculation (Granta)
Laline Paull - The Bees (Fourth Estate)
Sarah Perry - After Me Comes The Flood (Serpent's Tail)
Richard Powers - Orfeo (Norton)
Gareth L Powell - Hive Monkey (Ack-Ack Macaque) (Solaris)
Zia Haider Rahman - In The Light Of What We Know (Picador)
Mahesh Rao - The Smoke Is Rising (Daunt Books)
Danny Rhodes - The Fan (Arcadia)
Lee Rourke - Vulgar Things (Fourth Estate)
Nikesh Shukla - Meatspace (The Friday Project)
Kathryn Simmonds - Love And Fallout (Seren)
Alex Smith - Devilskein and Dearlove (Arachne Press)
Richard Smyth - Wild Ink (Dead Ink)
James Smythe - No Harm Can Come To A Good Man (Borough Press)
Neil DA Stewart - The Glasgow Coma Scale (Corsair)
Simon Sylvester - The Visitors (Quercus)
Donna Tartt - The Goldfinch (Little, Brown)
Lavie Tidhar - The Violent Century (Hodder & Stoughton)
Jonathan Trigell - The Tongues Of Men (Corsair)
Christos Tsiolkas - Barracuda (Atlantic)
Dan Tyte - Half Plus Seven (Parthian)
Emma Jane Unsworth - Animals (Canongate)
Iman Verjee - In Between dreams (Oneworld)
Willy Vlautin - The Free (Faber)
Tom Vowler - That Dark Remembered Day (Headline)
Sarah Waters - The Paying Guests (Virago)
Jemma Wayne - After Before (Legend Press)
Will Wiles - The Way In (Fourth Estate)
Naomi Wood - Mrs Hemingway (Picador)
Starr Wood - Once Upon A Timepiece (Bo Tree Books)
Those are the books you've selected for this year's Not the Booker prize. I'm not even going to count them, there are so many. The thought makes my brain ache. And that's just the way we like it: challenging, overwhelming, diverse, divisive, full of books of every imaginable type. Interesting, in short.
But wonderful as that list may be, we now have to cut it down. We have to choose the six books that will go though into the next round. And when I say "we", I really mean you. This is where you get to vote. All you have to do is to nominate two books, from two different publishers, and accompany those votes with a review of your chosen books in the comments section below. This review should be something over 100 words long although, as the rules state, we won't be counting all that carefully… And that's it. Easy. I think. I hope.
You've got one week to get your votes in. The deadline is midnight 3 August. Which is to say, the middle of next Sunday night, ready for an announcement early the following week, just as soon as I've managed to do the counting. Ah, the counting.
Onwards!
