Novelist Julian Barnes has won the £50,000 ($78,500) Man Booker Prize for Fiction with The Sense of an Ending.

Below, we’ve linked to free samples of all the longlisted novelists for your reading pleasure.

Twitter buzzed with funny commentary as the judges gave speeches, but our favorite came from one San Francisco bookseller: “Please, God, let the winner of the #manbookerprize be the title that I haven’t run out of today. Thanks for listening.”

2011 Man Booker Prize for Fiction Longlist: Links to Free Samples

Julian Barnes The Sense of an Ending (Jonathan Cape – Random House)
Sebastian Barry On Canaan’s Side (PDF link) (Faber)
Carol Birch Jamrach’s Menagerie (Canongate Books)
Patrick deWitt The Sisters Brothers (Granta)
Esi Edugyan Half Blood Blues (Serpent’s Tail – Profile)
Yvvette Edwards A Cupboard Full of Coats (No excerpt available online) (Oneworld)
Alan Hollinghurst The Stranger’s Child (Picador – Pan Macmillan)
Stephen Kelman Pigeon English (Bloomsbury)
Patrick McGuinness The Last Hundred Days (Seren Books)
A.D. Miller Snowdrops (Atlantic)
Alison Pick Far to Go (Headline Review)
Jane Rogers The Testament of Jessie Lamb The Testament of Jessie Lamb (Sandstone Press)
D.J. Taylor Derby Day (Chatto & Windus – Random House)