United Agents Clients on Booker Longlist
Congratulations to Julian Barnes and Jane Rogers , whose novels The Sense of an Ending (Jonathan Cape) and The Testament of Jessie Lamb (Sandstone Press) have been selected for the 2011 Man Booker Prize longlist. A total of 13 books were chosen by the judges, who were chaired by the author, and former Director-General of MI5, Stella Rimington.
The Sense of an Ending, which will be published on 4th August, was called by the Sunday Times "A dexterously crafted narrative of unlooked-for consequences... a 21st-century successor to the great suspense novellas — quivering not just with tension but with psychological, emotional and moral reverberations — of late-Victorian and Edwardian masters such as Joseph Conrad, Henry James and Robert Louis Stevenson... "
The Testament of Jessie Lamb, published by Scottish Highlands-based Sandstone Press, is the story of a "near future" in which pregnant women are dying from an incurable disease. The novel was praised by The Independent for being a "small, calm voice of reason in an nonsensical world... [It]does not set up an elaborate apocalypse, but astringently strips away the smears hiding the apocalypses we really face.”
The shortlist of six authors for the prize will be announced on the 6th of September, and the winner on the 18th of October.