'A three-horse race': The Man Booker 2014 shortlist

Tom Tivnan

The shortlist for the 2014 Man Booker Prize has been announced, and for the first time features American authors. Joshua Ferris and Karen Joy Fowler will compete with Neel Mukherjee, Ali Smith, Richard Flanagan and Howard Jacobson for the £50,000 prize, announced on 14 October. BBC Arts asked Tom Tivnan, Features and Insight Editor of The Bookseller, for his thoughts.

My first thought after seeing the Man Booker Prize shortlist was that the Americans have not dominated Britain’s premier literary prize just yet. The second thought was, where the heck is David Mitchell?

First, the American question. The rule change in which the prize allowed our cousins across the pond into this year’s award for the first time was controversial to say the least, the source of much wailing and hand-wringing in the press.

Previously open only to British and Commonwealth authors, the new rules changed what was special about the prize, the naysayers said, and would mean American domination of the award for years to come.

Well, maybe not. There are two Americans on the six-strong list: Joshua Ferris with To Rise Again at a Decent Hour (Viking) and Karen Joy Fowler’s We Are All Completely Beside Ourselves (Serpent’s Tail). A decent showing for the USA by two fine writers, but curious.

Fowler and Ferris, it would be fair to say, are both a bit more commercial and slightly lightweight than the rest of the shortlist. At this moment, I would put the two Americans as the long-shots for winning the overall prize.

This had been the most unpredictable of longlists, with no clear favourite, even for the bookies. When the longlist was announced William Hill, for example, put Joseph O’Neill’s The Dog as its 4/1 frontrunner, whilst Paddy Power had O’Neill as a 12/1 outsider.

Yet if there was a bet that all — bookies and the book trade alike — would have counted on it was that David Mitchell’s rapturously-reviewed The Bone Clocks (Sceptre) would have been on the shortlist. But it failed to make the cut.

For my money, this year’s shortlist is a three-horse race between Richard Flanagan’s Narrow Road to the Deep North (Chatto & Windus), Ali Smith’s How to be Both (Hamish Hamilton) and Neel Mukherjee’s The Lives of Others (Chatto).

Australian Flanagan is perhaps most famous for Gould’s Book of Fish, his bestseller from 2001. He has won his fair share of awards Down Under, but it is fair to say he has been overlooked critically in the UK.

India-born London-resident Mukherjee makes the shortlist with just his second novel, and is one of best young writers in the English language. His book, The Lives of Others, is perhaps perfect Man Booker bait, the kind the judges historically have loved: lively, complex and multilayered.

And Smith may just be the best living British writer to have never won the Man Booker. She has been shortlisted twice — for Hotel World (2001) and The Accidental (2005) — maybe third time is the charm.

Although perhaps a bit of a long shot this time around, with his shortlisting for J (Cape), Howard Jacobson has the chance to join Hilary Mantel, Peter Carey and J M Coetzee as the only authors to win the award twice.

There is an interesting book trade component with Jacobson’s shortlisting. He won in 2010 with The Finkler Question, published by Bloomsbury. After his win, he returned to his old publisher Jonathan Cape, now part of the mammoth Penguin Random House group.

When Penguin and Random House merged last year to create the world’s biggest trade publisher, there were concerns raised about the huge company’s domination of not just bestseller lists, but book prizes.

Well, five of the six books on this year’s shortlist are from companies in the PRH group. The American writers may not have captured this year’s Man Booker, but one giant publisher has.