Sunday Read: Extracts from 2012 Man Booker Prize Shortlisted Novels
Earlier this week, we were delighted to announce that Cape Town-based author Tan Twan Eng had been shortlisted for the 2012 Man Booker Prize for his novel The Garden of Evening Mists. Twan is joined on the shortlist by Deborah Levy (Swimming Home), Hilary Mantel (Bring up the Bodies), Alison Moore (The Lighthouse), Will Self (Umbrella) and Jeet Thayil (Nacropolis). For today’s Sunday Read we bring you a special treat – excerpts from all these titles.
From Swimming Home by Deborah Levy:
When Kitty Finch took her hand off the steering wheel and told him she loved him, he no longer knew if she was threatening him or having a conversation. Her silk dress was falling off her shoulders as she bent over the steering wheel. A rabbit ran across the road and the car swerved. He heard himself say, ‘Why don’t you pack a rucksack and see the poppy fields in Pakistan like you said you wanted to?’
‘Yes,’ she said.
He could smell petrol. Her hands swooped over the steering wheel like the seagulls they had counted from their room in the Hotel Negresco two hours ago.
From Bring up the Bodies by Hilary Mantel:
His relations with the queen, as the summer draws to its official end, are chary, uncertain, and fraught with distrust. Anne Boleyn is now 34 years old, an elegant woman, with a refinement that makes mere prettiness seem redundant. Once sinuous, she has become angular. She retains her dark glitter, now rubbed a little, flaking in places. Her prominent dark eyes she uses to good effect, and in this fashion: she glances at a man’s face, then her regard flits away, as if unconcerned, indifferent. There is a pause: as it might be, a breath. Then slowly, as if compelled, she turns her gaze back to him. Her eyes rest on his face. She examines this man. She examines him as if he is the only man in the world. She looks as if she is seeing him for the first time, and considering all sorts of uses for him, all sorts of possibilities which he has not even thought of himself. To her victim the moment seems to last an age, during which shivers run up his spine. Though in fact the trick is quick, cheap, effective and repeatable, it seems to the poor fellow that he is now distinguished among all men. He smirks. He preens himself. He grows a little taller. He grows a little more foolish.
From The Lighthouse by Alison Moore:
Futh stands on the ferry deck, holding on to the cold railings with his soft hands. The wind pummels his body through his new anorak, deranges his thinning hair and brings tears to his eyes. It is summer and he was not expecting this. He has not been on a ferry since he was twelve, when he went abroad for the first time with his father. It was summer then too and the weather was just as rough so perhaps this should not be taking him by surprise.
His father took him to the ferry’s cinema. Futh does not remember what they saw. When they sat down, the lights were still up and there was no one else in there. He remembers having a bucket of warm popcorn on his lap. His father, smelling of the lager he had drunk beforehand at the bar, turned to Futh to say, ‘Your mother sold popcorn.’
- Keep reading: Salt Publishing (pdf download)
From Narcopolis by Jeet Thayil:
Before Dimple came to be called Zeenat, she worked part-time for Rashid and disappeared every evening to the hijra’s brothel. I smoked at her station even if other pipes were free, and we talked the way smokers talk, horizontally, with long pauses, our words so soft they sounded like the incomprehensible phrases spoken by small children. I asked the usual foolish questions. Is it better to be a man or a woman? Dimple said: For conversation, better to be a woman, for everything else, for sex, better to be a man. Then I asked if she was a man or a woman and she nodded as if it was the first time she’d been asked. She was about twenty-five then and she had a habit in those days of shaking the hair into her eyes and smiling for no reason at all, a sweet smile as I remember, with no hint there of the changes that would overtake her.
From Umbrella by Will Self:
- Not loading? Read at ISSUU
Tan Twan Eng reads from The Garden of Evening Mists:
- Not loading? Watch on YouTube
Book details
- The Garden of Evening Mists by Tan Twan Eng
Book homepage
EAN: 9781905802623
Find this book with BOOK Finder!
- Bring up the Bodies by Hilary Mantel
EAN: 9780007315093
Find this book with BOOK Finder!
- The Lighthouse by Alison Moore
EAN: 9781907773174
Find this book with BOOK Finder!
- Umbrella by Will Self
EAN: 9781408820148
Find this book with BOOK Finder!
- Narcopolis by Jeet Thayil
EAN: 9780571275762
Find this book with BOOK Finder!
- Swimming Home by Deborah Levy
EAN: 9780571299607
Find this book with BOOK Finder!
Apr
