The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao by Junot Díaz
Nominated by: The Free Library of Philadelphia, USA + Houston Public Library, Texas, USA + Cleveland Public Library, Ohio, USA + Boston Public Library, USA + New York Public Library, USA + Lincoln Library, Springfield, Illinois, USA + Cork City Libraries, Ireland
Publisher of Nominated Edition: Riverhead Books
Judges’ Comments
Junot Diaz’s first novel is an exhilarating, roller-coaster of a read, recounting in witty high-octane Spanish the story of a Dominican immigrant family in New York.
Our hero, fat-boy nerd, Oscar, dreams of romance and literary success and possibly even achieves it, although he can’t avoid Dominica’s killing fields.
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Ravel by Jean Echenoz
Translated from the original French by LInda Coverdale
Nominated by: Galway County Library, Ireland + Bibliothèque Municipale de Nice, France + Münchner Stadtbibliothek, Munich, Germany
Publisher of Nominated Edition: The New Press
Judges’ Comments
Jean Echenoz’s Ravel is a masterful renegotiation of the flimsy boundary between fiction and biography. It is a short but virtuoso performance, depicting the last decade in the life of Maurice Ravel. It is a brief novel, which manages to feel — like a composition by Ravel himself — rich and expansive, full of precise detail, quirky humour, and disquiet in the shadow of steadily approaching death.
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The Reluctant Fundamentalist by Mohsin Hamid
Nominated by: Universitäts-und Landesbibliothek Bonn, Germany + Cleveland Public Library, Ohio, USA + Stedelijke Openbare Bibliotheek Gent, Belgium + Cape Breton Regional Library, Sydney, Canada + Dublin City Public Libraries, Ireland + Birmingham Libraries, England + Stockholm Public Library, Sweden + Tweebronnen Openbare Bibliotheek, Leuven, Belgium
Publisher of Nominated Edition: Hamish Hamilton Ltd + Harcourt + Doubleday Canada
Judges’ Comments
Thrilling but thoughtful, The Reluctant Fundamentalist grips the imagination from the first line to the climax in its final pages. The novel traces the story of Changez, from Lahore, Pakistan, his early professional years in America, his return home, and his encounter with a mysterious American visitor in a city square. Over the hours that follow this meeting, Mohsin Hamid’s second novel guides readers through one of the murkiest of 9/11’s legacies: our now-endless capacity to be suspicious of one another.
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The Archivist’s Story by Travis Holland
Nominated by: New Hampshire State Library, Concord, USA
Publisher of Nominated Edition: Dial Press
Judges’ Comments
Set in Moscow in 1939, this exquisitely crafted novel picks its way deftly through a maze of mistrust and chicanery, quietly illuminating a young archivist’s quest to save an unpublished story from burning by order of an arcane regime. As evocative of Chekov as it is of Vermeer, this novel has the hallmark of a classic.
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The Burnt-Out Town of Miracles by Roy Jacobsen
Translated from the original Norwegian by Don Shaw and Don Bartlett
Nominated by: Stavanger Bibliotek og Kulturhus, Norway
Publisher of Nominated Edition: John Murray Publishers
Judges’ Comments
The subtle and profound tale of a self-professed village idiot resisting war and its degradations with nothing but his own unwavering sanity, exposing the madness and absurdity of 20th century conflicts and leading us to the core of humanity. Written in powerful sparse language, this is a masterpiece of a novel allowing us to understand the universal by exploring the specific.
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The Indian Clerk by David Leavitt
Nominated by: Jafet Library, The American University of Beirut, Lebanon + San Diego Public Library, California, USA + The State Library of South Australia, Adelaide
Publisher of Nominated Edition: Bloomsbury Publishing
Judges’ Comments
The encounter of two great mathematicians painted on the rich canvas of English society at the beginning of the last century expands into a thorough and at times funny examination of intellectual and cultural colonialism as well as the mutual alienations of, and benefits to its protagonists. A stylish and well-researched novel, presenting us with deep insights into the essence and the interplay of gender, class and culture.
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Animal’s People by Indra Sinha
Nominated by: Mestska Knihovna v Praze / Municipal Library of Prague, Czech Republic
Publisher of Nominated Edition: Simon & Schuster
Judges’ Comments
‘Animal’ is the nick-name of a teenage Indian street boy, hideously malformed by a factory explosion. His energy and no-holds-barred ingenuity, brilliantly brought to life by Indra Sinha, make him invaluable to those fighting state corruption and lead him, via multiple scams and lunacies, towards brighter hopes.
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Man Gone Down by Michael Thomas
Nominated by: The National Library Service of Barbados, Bridgtown
Publisher of Nominated Edition: Grove Atlantic Inc.
Judges’ Comments
The first person narrator in Man Gone Down has not fallen, yet. But he stands at a precipice. A black man from Boston married to a white woman with whom he has three children. A once promising Harvard student now broke and working in construction in Brooklyn. Man Gone Down is a novel that will resonate long into the future, a work that devastates and rebuilds, but is attuned always to the human yearning that is the story’s beating heart.