Exploring Top Books of Shelfari

Tags: booker longlist 2011

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Pigeon English
by Stephen Kelman
'Simultaneously accurate and fantastical, this boy's love letter to the world made me laugh and tremble all the way through. Pigeon English is a triumph' Emma Donoghue, author of Room 'A powerful and impressive novel ... Kelman knows the world of boys - their language, their humour, their thoughts - and Harri's voice is dazzlingly authentic. Utterly convincing and deeply moving, this is a book that we should all... (more)
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The Sisters Brothers
by Patrick deWitt
Two notoriously vicious guns-for-hire pursue their target as gold fever sweeps the 1850s frontier. This darkly comic western follows the brothers' quirky misadventures as narrator Eli starts to doubt their gunslinging way of life. The style is a combination of magical realism, stream of consciousness and picaresque western adventure story. Many of the characters the brothers enconter are emblems of their own... (more)
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Snowdrops
by Andrew Miller
An intense psychological drama that echoes sophisticated entertainments like Gorky Park and The Talented Mr. Ripley. Nick Platt is a British lawyer working in Moscow in the early 2000s—a place where the cascade of oil money, the tightening grip of the government, the jostling of the oligarchs, and the loosening of Soviet social mores have led to a culture where corruption, decadence, violence, and betrayal... (more)
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Books reviewed in Planet: The Welsh Internationalist
The Last Hundred Days
by Patrick McGuinness
The socialist state is in crisis, the shops are empty and old Bucharest vanishes daily under the onslaught of Ceaucescu's demolition gangs. Paranoia is pervasive and secret service men lurk in the shadows. In The Last 100 Days, Patrick McGuinness creates an absorbing sense of time and place as the city struggles to survive this intense moment in history. He evokes a world of extremity and ravaged beauty from the... (more)
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On Canaan's Side
by Sebastian Barry
From the two-time Man Booker shortlisted author of The Secret Scripture comes a magnificent new novel that is the story of the twentieth century in America. Told in the first person, as a narrative of Lilly Bere's life over seventeen days, On Canaan's Side opens as she mourns the loss of her grandson, Bill. Lilly revisits her past, going back to the moment she was forced to flee Ireland, at the end of... (more)
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The Stranger's Child
by Alan Hollinghurst
Alan Hollinghurst’s first novel in seven years is a magnificent, century-spanning saga about a love triangle that spawns a myth—and a family mystery—across generations. In 1913, George Sawle brings charming, handsome Cecil Valance to his family’s modest home outside London for a summer weekend. George is enthralled by his Cambridge schoolmate, and soon his sixteen-year-old sister, Daphne, is equally besotted by... (more)
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The Testament of Jessie Lamb
by Jane Rogers
Jessie Lamb is an ordinary girl living in extraordinary times: as her world collapses, her idealism and courage drive her towards the ultimate act of heroism. If the human race is to survive, it's up to her. Set just a month or two in the future, in a world irreparably altered by an act of biological terrorism, The Testament of Jessie Lamb explores a young woman's determination to make her life count for... (more)
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Derby Day
by D. J. Taylor
Nominated for the Man Booker Prize, an exquisite tale of romance and rivalry, gambling and greed, from one of England’s finest writers As the shadows lengthen over the June grass, all England is heading for Epsom Down—high life and low life, society beauties and Whitechapel street girls, bookmakers and gypsies, hawkers and thieves. Hopes are high, nerves are taut, hats are tossed in the air—this is Derby... (more)
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Far to Go
by Alison Pick
"I wish this were a happy story. A story to make you doubt, and despair, and then have your hopes redeemed so you could believe again, at the last minute, in the essential goodness of the world around us and the people in it." So begins the mysterious present-day narrator and the compelling saga that takes us deep inside the world of one Jewish family during the lead-up to the Nazi occupation of... (more)
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A Cupboard Full of Coats
by Yvvette Edwards
Redolent of Monica Ali and Zadie Smith, Yvvette Edwards' bold debut is a searing story of family, jealousy, and tragic betrayal. "He just knocked, that was all, knoced at the front door and waited, like the fourteen years since the night I'd killed my mother hadn't happened at all..." Fourteen years ago, Jinx' mother was brutally murdered in their East London home. Overwhelmed by the part she played, Jinx's... (more)