The Booker Prize Longlist announced

The judges for the 2010 Man Booker Prize for Fiction today, Tuesday 27 July, announce the longlist for the prize, the leading literary award in the English speaking world. A total of 138 books, 14 of which were called in by the judges, were considered for the ‘Man Booker Dozen’ longlist of 13 books.

There are two Irish Authors on the list:

Emma Donoghue Room (Pan MacMillan – Picador)

Due for publication next week, ‘Room’ was sold to publishers in Britain and the US for over €1m after a bidding war.

The novel was directly inspired by the Fritzl case in Austria. Fritzl locked his daughter in the basement of his home for 24 years, raped her and had children with her, some of whom never saw sunlight until their release.

In Ms Donoghue’s novel, a boy and his mother are held captive in a one-room garden building, similar to the Jaycee Dugard case in California. The story is told in the voice of five-year-old Jack who thinks the locked room he lives in is the whole world. He was born there and to protect him his mother has never told him about the outside.

Paul Murray Skippy Dies (Penguin – Hamish Hamilton)

Dubliner Paul Murray’s second novel ‘Skippy Dies’ is a tragic comedy about a couple of boys in a Dublin boarding school.

One is an overweight genius whose hobbies include very difficult maths and the search for extra-terrestrial intelligence, while his roommate falls for the frisbee-playing siren from the girls’ school next door. Published earlier this year, the book has won huge praise from the critics here and in the UK.