Barnes tipped for glory as Booker judges look for ‘readable’ winner

JULIAN Barnes emerged yesterday as the favourite to win this year’s Man Booker prize as the judges revealed what they called a “readable” shortlist.

Barnes’s novel, The Sense of an Ending about an ordinary man musing on the absence of drama in his life, is joined on the shortlist by five other books including, for the first time, a Western.

The Sisters Brothers, by the Canadian author Patrick deWitt, is a chilling tale of brothers Eli and Charlie and their experiences in gold rush America in 1851. It is said to be reminiscent of a Coen brothers film.

Ion Trewin, literary director of the Man Booker prizes, said: “We can probably safely say, it’s the first Western on the shortlist in the history of the prize.”

Former director general of MI5, Dame Stella Rimington, who is chair of the judges, said: “It’s a novel written in the gold rush but it doesn’t have red indians. It’s not that sort of Western at all.”

The other books in contention for the prize, which will be announced on 18 October, include two debut novelists, Stephen Kelman, whose novel Pigeon English was inspired by the real-life case of Damilola Taylor’s death, and AD Miller, whose book Snowdrops chronicles the collapse of the Soviet Union.

The latest novel from British author Alan Hollinghurst – who had been tipped as one of the favourites to win the £50,000 prize and won in 2004 for The Line of Beauty – was not included in the shortlist.

Barnes, 65, has been nominated for the Booker three times previously, but has never won.

Yesterday, judges said that they wanted to produce a readable shortlist, rather than books that languish half-read and admired on people’s shelves.

Dame Stella said: “We all thought we wanted to find books that all over the country, all over the world, people would read and enjoy. We were looking for enjoyable books. I think they are very readable books.

“We wanted people to buy these books and read them, not buy them and admire them.”

Politician and author Chris Mullin, one of the judges, added: “Other people said to me when they heard I was in the judging panel, ‘I hope you pick something readable this year’. That for me was such a big factor, it had to zip along.”

Kelman’s Pigeon English has generated the most excitement. It is the story of an 11-year-old from Ghana who arrives in Britain with his mother to live in an inner-city council estate.

When a boy is knifed to death on the high street, the boy from Ghana starts a murder investigation of his own.

Writer Matthew d’Ancona, one of the judges, said the “magnificent book” was a “linguistic triumph” featuring South London slang and Ghanaian patois that “totally manages to occupy the inner life of someone else”.

The shortlisted novels also include Half Blood Blues, “about war and its aftermath, secrets and betrayal”, by Canadian Esi Edugyan.

British author Carol Birch, who has been previously longlisted, is shortlisted for Jamrach’s Menagerie, the story of a young boy who is knocked unconscious by a Bengal tiger in London’s East End.