Lads Off The Mark
As always, British bookies are in full swing, betting on the Man Booker longlist. Anuradha Roy (Sleeping on Jupiter) is not the current favourite, with odds around 10/1 midweek, it's at the bottom of the pile. Sunjeev Sahota (The Year of the Runaways) wasn’t doing that good either. The bookies’ favourite is Hanya Yanagihara (A Little Life), who'd be the first American to win the prize if they are right. But Anuradha and Sunjeev can take heart, as mostly the bookies have been proved wrong. Last year at this stage, the eventual winner, Richard Flanagan's The Narrow Road to the Deep North, wasn’t in Ladbroke’s reckoning.
Billy’s Boy
E.L. Doctorow, American author of such celebrated books as Ragtime, Billy Bathgate and The March, who died recently, came from a family of ardent readers. His father, a fan of crime writing, named his son Edgar Allan Poe. His father died early but Doctorow said how he remembered asking his mother: “Do you and Dad know you named me after a drug-addicted, alcoholic delusional paranoid with strong necrophiliac tendencies?” His mother didn’t find it funny.
Lazarus Salander
Those still suffering from Steig Larsson’s Millennium Trilogy hangover can rejoice—Lisbeth Salander will be back. Swedish author David Lagercrantz takes over from where Larsson left, with The Girl in the Spider’s Web (Hachette India). Mikael Blomkvist and Salander team up again to bust a gang of cyber gangsters who have plotted to bring terror to Stockholm. Sequels to classics have in the past disappointed. Will this one defy the rule?
