The Review Show Special: The Man Booker Award
Sun Oct 13, 8-9pm, BBC4
They’ll almost certainly make you want to read all six, but as you’re unlikely to do so before Tuesday, here’s a handy guide in case you need someone to root for on the night: if you like books about England, go for Jim Crace’s ‘Harvest’; for a historical epic from down under, it has to be New Zealand writer Eleanor Catton's ‘The Luminaries’; if you’ve a very short attention span, Colm Toibin’s 112-pages about Jesus’ mother, ‘The Testament of Mary’, should be your man.
For geographical scope you can choose two tomes that take their protagonists respectively from Zimbabwe and Calcutta to the US, NoViolet Bulawayo’s debut ‘We Need New Names’, or Jhumpa Lahiri’s rich epic ‘The Lowland’; and finally, for emo-fans, Ruth Ozeki's ‘A Tale for the Time Being’ is about a suicidal Tokyo schoolgirl whose diary washes up from the sea in British Columbia a decade after her disappearance. If you’re betting, Jim Crace is the bookies’ favourite.
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