Booker shortlist, 2008

The shortlist for this year's Booker Prize for Fiction has been announced. The official name of the prize is the Man Booker prize and it's the award for the finest of finest in fiction. The award is 40 years old and it rewards an author from either a commonwealth country or the Republic of Ireland. Past winners include: Anne Enright (The gathering), Kiran Desai (Inheritance of loss) and John Banville (The sea).

This year's shortlist is comprised of:

The white tiger by Aravind Adiga (F A2355w)
Relocating to New Delhi when he is offered a new job, Balram Halwai is disillusioned by the city's twenty-first-century materialism and technology-spawned violence, a circumstance that forces him to question his loyalties, ambitions, and past.

The secret scripture by Sebastian Barry (F B281s)
Recording the events of her life from a mental hospital as her hundredth birthday approaches, Roseanne McNulty considers returning to society when she learns that the hospital is about to close, but her situation is complicated by the possibility that Roseanne remembers her life quite differently from what is documented in her patient records.

Sea of poppies by Amitav Ghosh (coming soon)
Preparing to fight China's nineteenth-century Opium Wars, a motley assortment of sailors and passengers, including a bankrupt rajah, a widowed tribeswoman, and a free-spirited French orphan, comes to experience family-like ties that eventually span continents, races, and generations.

Clothes on their back by Linda Grant (F G7622c)
A story about survival - both everyday and heroic - and a young woman who discovers the complications, even betrayals, that inevitably accompany the fierce desire to live.

Northern clemency by Philip Hensher (coming soon)
In 1974, the Sellers are transplanted from London to Sheffield in northern England. On the day they move in, the Glover household across the street is in upheaval: convinced that his wife is having an affair, Malcolm Glover has suddenly disappeared. The reverberations of this rupture will be felt for years as the connection between the families deepens. But it will be the particular crises of ten-year-old Tim Glover—set off by two seemingly inconsequential but ultimately indelible acts of cruelty—that will erupt, full-blown, decades later.

A fraction of the whole by Steve Toltz (F T6546f)
After his father's death, Jasper reflects on Martin Dean, the man who had raised him in intellectual captivity and who had spent his entire life analyzing absolutely everything, and describes his father's failed battle to make a lasting impression on the world.