Posted Wednesday July 29th 2009
by James Smith

The longlist for the Man Booker Prize was announced last night. It's an embarrassment of riches: novels by Hilary Mantel, JM Coetzee, AS Byatt, Colm Toíbín, and William Trevor for starters, with the addition of some of the finest young writers currently gracing the shelves of your local bookshop – and a ‘biography’ of Tarzan’s simian friend Cheeta, to boot.

I’m particularly pleased to see authors who have won – or been shortlisted for, or judged – Booktrust prizes in the past. Sarah Hall, who won the John Llewellyn Rhys Prize in 2007 for The Carhullan Army (the same title that – inexplicably in our view – never made the Man Booker list that year) and was a judge for the prize in 2008, has been longlisted for the wonderful How to Paint a Dead Man; Sarah Waters was a judge for JLR in 2005 – her books are hugely popular among Booktrust staff; Adam Foulds was shortlisted for JLR last year for The Broken Word, his narrative poem about the Mau-Mau uprising; and Samantha Harvey was shortlisted for the Orange Prize (which is administered by Booktrust) and makes the Man Booker longlist for the same book.

The other contenders are Simon Mawer, Ed O’Loughlin, and James Scudamore. See below for the full list.

No commentary about the Man Booker longlist (or, indeed, any other prize long/shortlist) is complete without a gripe, so I’m going to follow Erica Wagner’s lead in the Times by bemoaning the fact that short stories aren't eligible. This year I've read collections quite as good as any novel I've picked up: James Lasdun’s It’s Beginning to Hurt, Tom Lee’s Greenfly and Deborah Kay Davies’ Grace, Tamar and Laszlo the Beautiful (which recently won the Wales Book of the Year). And it’s got it’s dodgier moments, but what about Philip Ó Ceallaigh’s The Pleasant Light of Day? I know all prizes need to set out and limit their terms of eligibility, but goodness knows short stories could do with the boost. (Orange Prize people – you could do the same.) Hmpf.

Gripe over. I’m off to the bookies to put a fiver on … hmm, let me think … Sarah … no: Sarah … um, Adam? … maybe Samantha … or Hilary …

2009 Man Booker Prize longlist

The Children's Book by AS Byatt (Chatto & Windus)
Summertime by JM Coetzee (Harvill Secker)
The Quickening Maze by Adam Foulds (Jonathan Cape)
How to Paint a Dead Man by Sarah Hall (Faber)
The Wilderness by Samantha Harvey (Jonathan Cape)
Me Cheeta by James Lever (Fourth Estate)
Wolf Hall by Hilary Mantel (Fourth Estate)
The Glass Room by Simon Mawer (Little, Brown)
Not Untrue and Not Unkind by Ed O'Loughlin (Penguin Ireland)
Heliopolis by James Scudamore (Harvill Secker)
Brooklyn by Colm Tóibín (Viking)
Love and Summer by William Trevor (Viking)
The Little Stranger by Sarah Waters (Virago)