If you live in the U.S. and want to read any of the three novels by women on the shortlist for Man Booker Prize www.themanbookerprize.com, good luck to you and the New York Mets. At least one of the novels, Anne Enright’s The Gathering, is listed as in stock on www.amazon.com. But I came up empty-handed at — and was told that, in fact, Enright’s book and the two others by women are not yet available in the U.S. — by a major Barnes & Noble store and two good independent booksellers.
But you can find Rebecca Gowers’s first novel, When to Walk www.groveatlantic.com, longlisted along with books by Anne Tyler and Jane Smiley for the 2007 Orange Broadband Prize for Fiction (formerly the Orange Prize) www.orangeprize.co.uk, a major U.K. award open to female writers of any nationality. One-Minute Book Reviews will post a review later this week of Gowers’s book, first published by the Edinburgh-based Canongate, which established its international reputation with the Booker Prize-winning Life of Pi.
By the way, all three of the Man Booker finalists by male authors are available here, and I had no trouble finding the two I wanted to read, Mister Pip and On Chesil Beach, which recently have blanketed Fifth Avenue bookstore windows.
(c) 2007 Janice Harayda. All rights reserved.
