Aravind Adiga Takes the Man Booker Prize

It looks like we’ll be moving that copy of Aravind Adiga‘s The White Tiger that Free Press sent last week even higher up our to-read stacks, as the debut novelist was presented with this year’s Man Booker Prize, presented annually to the best novel published by a citizen of the British Commonwealth (or Ireland). The victory came as a bit of a surprise to literary pundits, as Sebastian Barry‘s The Secret Scripture was widely considered the frontrunner in a competitive field that also saw novels from Amitav Ghosh, Linda Grant, Philip Hensher, and Steve Toltz.

We actually just got a galley of Hensher’s novel, The Northern Clemency, which Knopf scrambled to bring to the United States this fall (maybe the same day the White Tiger showed up, but we couldn’t say for sure). As far as we know, that just leaves Grant as the only author on this year’s Booker shortlist who hasn’t lined up an American publisher yet, although we note that The Clothes on Her Back is available at Amazon.com in an imported edition. (UPDATE: We’ve since been informed that Scribner has the book ready for release in November.)

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