They are calling it the Booker’s Dozen, these 13 novels announced on the Man Booker Prize longlist this week. The list is remarkable for two reasons. It is considerably shorter than the longlists of 19-20 books that the jury normally settles upon, with possibly each judge getting her nominations included before getting down to the actual business of contesting opinion for the shortlist and thereafter the winner. And arguably related is the second: there is a striking thematic coherence. Most of the books, a majority by so far little-known writers, explore human dramas that attend globalisation and inter-cultural contact.

Consider. In The Gift of Rain, Malaysian Tan Twan Eng revisits the Japanese invasion of Penang in the late 1930s. A friendship between a Japanese diplomat and a young Chinese-English settler extracts bitter conflicts of loyalties. In Mister Pip, New Zealand’s Lloyd Jones conveys the power of books (specifically, Great Expectations of course) in a story set during Papua New Guinea’s blockade of Bougainville island in the early 1990s.

In Consolation, France-based Canadian writer Michael Redhill tells of an academic controversy arising from a Toronto professor’s contention that a new stadium is being built upon a landfill that contains the remains of an Englishman’s treasure from another century. Chinese-Welsh Peter Ho Davies’s The Welsh Girl is set in the closing days of the second world war and follows the lives of, among others, a German prisoner of war in Wales and a Jewish out to interview Rudolf Hess. Edward Docx’s Self Help moves between St Petersburg and London in an Anglo-Russian family saga.

... contd.