Man Booker Prize longlist announced

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Thirteen books were announced on Tuesday to be in the running for the 2010 Man Booker Prize. Known as the Man Booker longlist, or the Man Booker dozen, the list includes new novels by Peter Carey, David Mitchell and Rose Tremain. The list will be winnowed to a short list before the eventual winner -- who receives a prize worth more than $77,000 -- is announced in October.

Peter Carey has won the prize twice before, for “Oscar and Lucinda” in 1988 and “True History of the Kelly Gang” in 2001. He’s nominated this time around for “Parrot and Olivier in America,” a book about Alexis de Tocqueville.

Christos Tsiolkas, who, like Carey, hails from Australia, has already won the Commonwealth Prize for his comedy of manners “The Slap.” Tsiolkas was at the L.A. Times Festival of Books in April 2010.

Irish author David Mitchell, who was in Los Angeles last week reading from “The Thousand Autumns of Jacob de Zoet,” garnered his third Man Booker longlist nomination.

Books eligible for the 2010 Man Booker prize must be published in the UK between October 1, 2009 and September 30, 2010. That often means that the list includes books not yet available in the U.S. Last year, for example, Hilary Mantel’s “Wolf Hall” -- which took the top honor -- was three months away from its U.S. publication.

The complete Man Booker Prize longlist is:

“Parrot and Olivier in America” by Peter Carey (LA Times review)

“Room” by Emma Donoghue (coming in September)

“The Betrayal” by Helen Dunmore (not yet available)

“In a Strange Room” by Damon Galgut

“The Finkler Question” by Howard Jacobson (not yet available)

“The Long Song” by Andrea Levy

“C” by Tom McCarthy (coming in September)

“The Thousand Autumns of Jacob de Zoet “ by David Mitchell (LA Times review)

“February” by Lisa Moore

“Skippy Dies” by Paul Murray (coming in August)

“Trespass” by Rose Tremain (coming in October)

“The Slap” by Christos Tsiolkas (LA Times review)

“The Stars in the Bright Sky” by Alan Warner

138 books were submitted to judges Sir Andrew Morton, Rosie Blue, Deborah Bull, Tom Sutcliffe and Frances Wilson. The short list will be announced on Sept. 7.

-- Carolyn Kellogg
twitter.com/paperhaus

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