Galgut is a South African playwright and novelist, who wrote his first novel aged 17. The boy speaks (his lines printed in italics) with a precocious charm that's entirely believable, while the father tries so hard to make it all work. But what holds the two together is a deep engagement with the natural world and environmental concerns, which have been the hallmark of Powers's writing (notably The Overstory, which was also shortlisted for the Booker Prize, and won a Pulitzer Prize in 2019 – a 600-page novel shaped by the lives of five trees).īut for all its unabashed politics, the style of Bewilderment is dynamic and easygoing. The book is told from the perspective of the father, Theo, with all his anxieties and grief laid bare, tempered by joy and love. The boy is also bullied by his schoolmates, misunderstood by many teachers, assessed by doctors … and scraped raw by the world. His beloved mother died when he was seven, and his astrobiologist father is trying to balance academic work with parenting a mercurial child who is sometimes insightful and at other times depressed or full of rage. ![]() The world, it turns out, is unfair, arbitrary, and given to easy diagnoses – especially if you're an eccentric kid who doesn't look at the world in anything like a conventional way. This book is both sweet and heartbreaking tender and imbued with deep frustration. "Books themselves are empathy machines and travels to other planets," Powers told The New York Times. Nadifa Mohamed's third novel is a powerful piece of fiction that shines a spotlight on a terrible injustice in Britain's not-so-distant history. While the reader knows Mahmood's fate is sealed, our hero remains hopeful and determined that justice will prevail. Mohamed's affection for her flawed hero is obvious, but she has empathy to spare for her other characters too, including the Jewish shopkeeper and murder victim, renamed Violet Volacki, and Violet's grieving family.Īs the racist, corrupt police narrow their sights on Mattan, the pace of this book quickens, and the tension escalates. He is a small-time crook and a separated father of three, who still lives across the road from his ex-wife, and hopes to pull his family back together. Mohamed takes to the bustling, multiracial town of Tiger Bay, where we meet Mattan, a man of quiet dignity and surprising anger. This true story is the inspiration for The Fortune Men, a gripping and generous novel by the British-Somali writer Nadifa Mohamed – the only British writer to make this year's shortlist. Wrongly convicted of the murder of a local shopkeeper, his conviction was quashed 45 years after his death. In 1952, the Somali seaman Mahmood Mattan became the last man to be hanged in Cardiff. Somali-British author Nadifa Mohamed is the first Somali person to be shortlisted for the Booker. The winner of the Booker Prize will be announced on November 4 (AEDT). ![]() To help you navigate the shortlist, we've asked three experts - Claire Nichols and Sarah L'Estrange from ABC RN's The Book Show, and Kate Evans from ABC RN's The Bookshelf - to share their thoughts on each book. Notably, four of the six shortlisted authors are 40 years old or younger. Rounding out the list: veteran South African author Damon Galgut (nominated for the third time), and young Sri Lankan Tamil novelist Anuk Arudpragasam. Instead, not quite an American takeover, but a strong showing: Pulitzer Prize winner and former Booker nominee Richard Powers (The Overstory, 2017), first-time novelist Patricia Lockwood, and travel writer and novelist Maggie Shipstead. ![]()
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