Possums! We LOVE "Handling Edna: The Unauthorised Biography of Dame Edna" by Barry Humphries

Booker Prize 2009 Shortlist: The Little Stranger - Sarah Waters

When Dr Faraday is urgently called to Hundreds Hall, he is both curious and nostalgic. Nearly thirty years before, he had visited the house with his mother, who had once worked there as a maid. As a ten year-old boy, he had been deeply impressed by the grandness of the house and of the Ayres family. But as he approaches the Hall on an unusually hot summer afternoon in 1947, Dr Faraday immediately recognises that much has changed there, as it has virtually everywhere in post war Britain. The crumbling house and its overgrown gardens are badly in need of maintenance, and the Ayres family is clearly struggling to maintain some semblance of their former way of life as well-respected country gentry.

So begins Dr Faraday’s friendship with the remaining Ayres family (the dowager Mrs Ayres, the spinster daughter, Caroline and the son and heir to the estate, Roderick), a relationship complicated by his lingering class resentments, by his growing attraction to Caroline and more importantly, by the oddness and drama of events that begin to occur in the house as the hot summer gives way to a dark and gloomy winter.

The Ayres family is left in a demoralised state after a shocking incident at a party. Roderick seems particularly badly affected, becoming anxious and secretive, and while Dr Faraday believes his behaviour to have its roots in nervous exhaustion, there are hints that there may be something odder at work. Betty, the maid, believes the house to be haunted; Caroline is uneasy, and Mrs Ayres is troubled with memories of her first child, Susan. Soon Roderick’s behaviour tips over into something more alarming and the house begins almost to take on a life of its own, even Dr Faraday’s scientific assurances are challenged.

Author Biography

Sarah Waters was born in July 1966 in Neyland, Pembrokeshire and went to the University of Kent. Her first book, the Victorian lesbian novel Tipping the Velvet won a Betty Trask Award in 1999 and was adapted into a three part television serial, taking the same title, on BBC2 in 2002. Fingersmith, published in 2002 was shortlisted for the Man Booker Prize as well as the Orange Prize. This was also televised as a serial on BBC1 in 2005. Sarah Waters lives in London.

Booker Prize 2009 Shortlist: The Glass Room - Simon Mawer

High on a Czechoslovak hill, the Landauer House shines as a marvel of steel, glass and onyx. Built specially for newlyweds Viktor and Liesel Landauer, a Jew married to a gentile, it is one of the wonders of modernist architecture. But the radiant honesty and idealism of 1930 that the house seems to engender quickly tarnishes as the storm clouds of World War Two gather. Eventually, as Nazi troops enter the country, the family, accompanied by Viktor’s lover Kata and her child Marika, must flee.

Yet the family’s exile does not signify the end of this spectacular building. It slips from hand to hand, from Czech to Nazi to Soviet and finally back to the Czechoslovak state, the crystalline perfection of the Glass Room always exerting a gravitational pull on those who know it. It becomes a laboratory, a shelter from the storm of war, and a place where the broken and the ruined find some kind of comfort, until with the collapse of Communism, the Landauers are finally drawn back to where their story began.

Author Biography

Simon Mawer was born in 1948 in England, and spent his childhood there, in Cyprus and in Malta. He now lives with his wife and two children in Italy, and teaches at the English School in Rome. Mawer is also the author of Swimming to Ithaca, The Gospel of Judas and The Fall for which he won The Boardman Tasker Award.

Booker Prize 2009 Shortlist: Wolf Hall - Hilary Mantel

Set in England in the 1520s, Henry VIII is on the throne, but has no heir. Cardinal Wolsey is his chief advisor, charged with securing the divorce the pope refuses to grant. Into this atmosphere of distrust and need comes Thomas Cromwell, first as Wolsey’s clerk, and later his successor.

Cromwell is a wholly original man: the son of a brutal blacksmith, a political genius, a briber, a charmer, a bully, a man with a delicate and deadly expertise in manipulating people and events. Ruthless in pursuit of his own interests, he is as ambitious in his wider politics as he is for himself. His reforming agenda is carried out in the grip of a self-interested parliament and a king who fluctuates between romantic passions and murderous rages.

From one of our finest living writers, Wolf Hall is that very rare thing: a truly great English novel, one that explores the intersection of individual psychology and wider politics. With a vast array of characters, and richly overflowing with incident, it peels back history to show us Tudor England as a half-made society, moulding itself with great passion and suffering and courage.

Author Biography

Hilary Mantel was born in Glossop, Derbyshire, England on 6 July 1952. She studied Law at the London School of Economics and Sheffield University. She was employed as a social worker, and lived in Botswana for five years, followed by four years in Saudi Arabia, before returning to Britain in the mid-1980s. In 1987 she was awarded the Shiva Naipaul Memorial Prize for an article about Jeddah, and she was film critic for The Spectator from 1987 to 1991.

Her novels include Eight Months on Ghazzah Street (1988), set in Jeddah; Fludd (1989), set in a mill village in the north of England and winner of the Winifred Holtby Memorial Prize, the Cheltenham Prize and the Southern Arts Literature Prize; A Place of Greater Safety (1992), an epic account of the events of the French revolution that won the Sunday Express Book of the Year award; A Change of Climate (1994), the story of a missionary couple whose lives are torn apart by the loss of their child; and An Experiment in Love (1995), about the events in the lives of three schoolfriends from the north of England who arrive at London University in 1970, winner of the 1996 Hawthornden Prize.

Her other works include The Giant, O’Brien (1998) tells the story of Charles O’Brien who leaves his home in Ireland to make his fortune as a sideshow attraction in London. Giving Up the Ghost: A Memoir (2003), is an autobiography in fiction and non-fiction, taking the reader from early childhood through to the discoveries in adulthood that led her to writing; and Learning to Talk: Short Stories (2003).

Hilary Mantel’s novel Beyond Black (2005) tells the story of Alison, a Home Counties psychic, and her assistant, Colette. It was shortlisted for a 2006 Commonwealth Writers Prize and for the 2006 Orange Prize for Fiction. Her latest novel is Wolf Hall (2009).

In 2006 she was also awarded a CBE.

Booker Prize 2009 Shortlist: The Quickening Maze - Adam Foulds

The Quickening Maze is based on real events and is set in and around the High Beach Asylum in 1840. The asylum, built within Epping Forest, is a place of disorder and unpredictable dramas.

Foulds’ compelling tale centres on the life of the great nature poet John Clare. After years struggling with alcohol, critical neglect and depression, Clare finds himself in High Beach Asylum. At the same time another poet, the young Alfred Tennyson, moves nearby and becomes entangled in the life and catastrophic schemes of the asylum’s owner, the peculiar, charismatic Dr Matthew Allen.

Historically accurate, but brilliantly imagined, the closed world of High Beach and its various inmates - the doctor, his lonely daughter in love with Tennyson, the brutish staff and John Clare himself - are brought vividly to life. Foulds also exquisitely depicts life outside the walls; Nature and Clare’s paradise -the birds and animals, the gypsies living in the forest; his dream of home, of redemption, of escape.

The Quickening Maze is a deeply affecting book and work of intense and atmospheric imagination.

Author Biography

Adam Foulds was born in 1974, took a Creative Writing MA at the University of East Anglia and now lives in South London. His first novel, The Truth About These Strange Times, was published in 2007 and his book-length narrative poem, The Broken Word, the following year. He was named the Sunday Times Young Writer of the Year in 2008.

Booker Prize 2009 Shortlist: Summertime - JM Coetzee

A young English biographer is working on a book about the late writer, John Coetzee. He plans to focus on the years from 1972-1977 when Coetzee, in his thirties, is sharing a run-down cottage in the suburbs of Cape Town with his widowed father. This, the biographer senses, is the period when he was ‘finding his feet as a writer’.

Never having met Coetzee, he embarks on a series of interviews with people who were important to him - a married woman with whom he had an affair, his favourite cousin Margot, a Brazilian dancer whose daughter had English lessons with him, former friends and colleagues. From their testimony emerges a portrait of the young Coetzee as an awkward, bookish individual with little talent for opening himself to others. Within the family he is regarded as an outsider, someone who tried to flee the tribe and has now returned, chastened. His insistence on doing manual work, his long hair and beard, rumours that he writes poetry evoke nothing but suspicion in the South Africa of the time.

Sometimes heartbreaking, often very funny, Summertime shows us a great writer as he limbers up for his task.

It completes the majestic trilogy of fictionalised memoir begun with Boyhood and Youth.

Author Biography

J M Coetzee was born in South Africa in 1940. He won the 1983 Booker Prize with Life & Times of Michael K and then again with Disgrace in 1999. His novels include Waiting for the BarbariansThe Master of Petersburg (awarded the Irish Times International Fiction Prize in 1995). In 2003 he was awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature. J M Coetzee lives in Australia. (awarded the James Tait Black Memorial Prize in 1980) and

Booker Prize 2009 Shortlist: The Children's Book - AS Byatt

Olive Wellwood is a famous writer, interviewed with her children gathered at her knee. For each of them she writes a separate private book, bound in different colours and placed on a shelf. In their rambling house near Romney Marsh they play in a story-book world - but their lives, and those of their rich cousins, children of a city stockbroker, and their friends, the son and daughter of a curator at the new Victoria and Albert Museum, are already inscribed with mystery. Each family carries their own secrets.

Into their world comes a young stranger, a working-class boy from the potteries, drawn by the beauty of the Museum’s treasures. And in midsummer a German puppeteer arrives, bringing dark dramas. The world seems full of promise but the calm is already rocked by political differences, by Fabian arguments about class and free love, by the idealism of anarchists from Russia and Germany. The sons rebel against their parents’ plans; the girls dream of independent futures, becoming doctors or fighting for the vote.

This vivid, rich and moving saga is played out against the great, rippling tides of the day, taking us from the Kent marshes to Paris and Munich and the trenches of the Somme. Born at the end of the Victorian era, growing up in the golden summers of Edwardian times, a whole generation were heading for the darkness ahead; in their innocence, they were betrayed unintentionally by the adults who loved them. In a profound sense, this novel is indeed the children’s book.

Author Biography

A. S. Byatt was born in Yorkshire in 1936. She attended a Quaker school in York, and went on to study at Cambridge. In 1972 she became a full-time lecturer. She taught at the Central School of Art & Design, and was Senior Lecturer in English at University College, London, before becoming a full-time writer in 1983. She is the author of The Biographer’s Tale and the quartet, The Virgin in the Garden, Still Life, Babel Tower and A Whistling Woman, and her highly acclaimed collections of short stories include Sugar and Other Stories, The Matisse Stories, The Djinn in the Nightingale’s Eye, Elementals and her most recent book Little Black Book of Stories. In 1990 her novel Possession won the Booker Prize and the Irish Times/Aer Lingus International Fiction Prize. A S Byatt was appointed CBE in 1990 and DBE in 1999.