Will Neel Mukherjee keep the American novelists from the Booker Prize?

When the Man Booker Prize is announced tomorrow, history could be made. This year, after 45 years, the prize was opened up to any author whose books is originally in English and was published in the UK. Two Americans are among the shortlisted as a result of this move, but if the whispers are to be believed, thanks to an Indian-born British author, 2014 may not be America’s year at the Booker. Currently, the favourite to win the Booker prize’s 50,000 pounds is Neel Mukherjee. There are reports that the betting odds favour Kolkata-born Mukherjee to win (5/2 odds). On the eve of the Booker, we give you the lowdown on the six shortlisted books so that when the winner is announced on Tuesday, you can make all the right noises. [caption id=“attachment_1755767” align=“alignleft” width=“380”] Courtesy: Neel Mukherjee’s website.[/caption] The Lives of Others, Neel Mukherjee Beginning in the late 1960s, Mukherjee’s novel is the story of one family as its different members negotiate their way through that turbulent period of Indian history. Famine, arranged marriages, aristocracy, rebellion – The Lives of Others has all the elements that tend to find favour with Western juries, but the writing ensures the novel doesn’t feel like an album of exotica or stereotypes. Those who have read Jhumpa Lahiri’s The Lowland will notice that one strand of Mukherjee’s novel covers similar territory, but The Lives of Others is both more ambitious and hard-hitting. The Narrow Road to the Deep North, Richard Flanagan Covering 415 kilometres and built by Allied prisoners of war, the Burma Railway that connected Bangkok to Rangoon was also called the Death Railway. About 60,000 prisoners were forced to work on it and of them, about 12,399 died. The Narrow Road to the Deep North is about one who survived the experience. Flanagan moves forwards and backwards in time as he tells his hero, Dorrigo Evans’s story. Depending on how much importance you give to the idea of establishing a straight, narrative line, the jumps and omissions in The Narrow Road will seem either poetic or annoying to you. We Are All Completely Beside Ourselves, Karen Joy Fowler Fowler is one of the two American novelists in the Booker shortlist and her novel, We Are All Completely Beside Ourselves, has already won America’s PEN/ Faulkner prize for fiction this year. Fowler’s novel is a page-turner account of a family that is riddled with sadness and much to Fowler’s credit, she manages to make the book funny despite all the darkness in the story. Lost children, parents who fail to provide the support a child requires and hidden histories have appeared repeatedly in Fowler’s writing. We Are All Completely Beside Ourselves sees Fowler return to those themes and it’s perhaps not quite as brutal as, for instance, some of the stories in What I Didn’t See, but it is a book that grabs your attention and doesn’t let it go till the last page. Somewhere around page 70, Fowler presents a magnificent revelation that will make every reader sit up and catch their breath. J, Howard Jacobson Jacobson won the Booker Prize for the genteel wit of The Finkler Question and while his new book J also looks at issues of identity and belonging, it’s nothing like the one that won him the prize in 2010. J is set in a dystopic future that sounds frighteningly possible. This is a world that is governed by populist whims and fancies; a world made up of ballads, paperbacks and sensationalised rags-to-riches stories. The hero of J is Kevern Cohen, one of the few who listens to jazz and has no interest in romance novels. When he falls in love with Aillin, Kevern finds himself being scrutinised and pursued in a way that’s decidedly uncomfortable. Despite the flashes of wit and humour, J is a rather grim and violent novel. How to be Both, Ali Smith There are two love stories to read in this novel. Georgia is a teenager in the 1960s, Francesco is a young artist who lived in the 15th century. Georgia is struggling to come to terms with her mother’s death while Francesco, who has been raised as a boy even though she is actually a girl, must balance private and public personae. How to be Both comes highly recommended by British literary critics. However, it’s not as well-favoured by the Booker gambling circuit. To Rise Again At A Decent Hour, Joshua Ferris The other American novel in the Booker shortlist is a thriller. To Rise Again At A Decent Hour has as its hero a dentist, Dr. Paul O’Rourke, who seems to be well sorted but for the fact that he feels something is missing. The way he tries to fill this mysterious gap is by over-enthusiastically embracing his girlfriends’ religions even though he is actually an atheist. The novel turns into a curious cocktail of the history of religions and a comedy of errors when one of O’Rourke’s patients tells O’Rourke that the two of them belong to a secret cult.