Preview: A Man Booker half dozen vie for literary prize

LONDON (Reuters) - The winner of the 2015 Man Booker Prize, considered one of the world's most prestigious literary awards, will be announced on Tuesday in London. Here are capsule reviews by Reuters correspondents of the six short-listed contenders. “THE FISHERMEN” - CHIGOZIE OBIOMA Obioma’s dark debut novel tells the story of four brothers who, against the strict instructions of their father, go fishing in a river in their town in southeastern Nigeria. One day, on their way home, a madman who is seen by some as a prophet tells them the oldest brother will be killed by one of the others. Everything changes for the boys. Apart from being a riveting read, the book is a story of lost hope, both for the family and for Nigeria itself. Ben laments the rift that grows between the brothers but all the while there are references to divisions in the country - between regions, religions, rich and poor. A prized family possession is a calendar from the 1993 presidential campaign of Moshood Abiola, who campaigned under the slogan "Hope ’93" and was widely believed to have won the poll, only to see it annulled by incumbent president Ibrahim Babangida. Obioma has called his book a “wake-up call” to Nigeria. It is a beautifully written heart-rending tragedy. (Nigel Stephenson, Financial Markets) "A SPOOL OF BLUE THREAD" - ANNE TYLER Pulitzer Prize-winner Anne Tyler's "A Spool of Blue Thread" is the tale of the Whitshank family of Baltimore, a rounded, happy - or at least seemingly happy - family. But there are sharp corners. Ageing parents Red and Abby, a construction firm owner and retired social worker, have four grown-up children and several grandchildren. They appear so reassuringly normal that they only have two family tales - of how Red's father Junior snared a house, and his sister Merrick snared a husband. "These stories were viewed as quintessential - as defining in some way". And there's also the "beautiful, breezy yellow-and-green afternoon" on which Abby fell in love with Red. But as life goes on in Junior's prized house, surprising revelations emerge. These usually pop up in passing to jolt the reader, in contrast to the occasionally wearying, but mostly highly soothing description in minutiae of everyday existence. Tyler's knack is her ability to describe the ordinary and make it come alive. Her characters, despite their foibles, are likeable - just like us, we'd like to think. Yet the humour often lies in the way those characters are unaware of the effect they have on others, for instance churchgoing daughter-in-law Nora, drop-dead gorgeous and unfazed by anything. Tyler's critics say her characters are invariably middle-class and that's the case here, though some did start on the wrong side of the tracks. But ask yourself two things - do you worry about favoritism in your family, do you keep secrets from them? If the answer to both of these is yes, you'll want to read this book. (Carolyn Cohn, Insurance and Fund Management Correspondent) "A BRIEF HISTORY OF SEVEN KILLINGS” – MARLON JAMES “Road Killer, coulda shoulda full ya full o’ Lead. Eight boys two Datsuns white, Like duppy jump out in broad daylight...” Thus, in blank verse, Marlon James opens the central act of “A Brief History of Seven Killings” as coke-fuelled ghetto kids from “Copenhagen City” (Kingston’s Tivoli Gardens) clutch automatic weapons on their way to shoot up Hope Road, the home of Bob Marley in December 1976. “The Singer”, as he is called throughout, is preparing for a peace concert to try to reconcile gangs waging a war between shanty towns armed by either side of the Cold War. James’s unrelenting graphic violence and vivid characters have drawn parallels with Quentin Tarantino, and his extensive use of patois and Harlem slang, often in long streams of consciousness, read like a Jamaican "Finnegans Wake". Multiple voices replay the same scenes from different angles, building vivid characters and revealing hidden motives. There is nothing brief about James’s third novel and the killings pile up, wearing down the reader with a torrent of obscenity that will offend many. The novel offers a cast of characters, and extra help with vocabulary would also be useful, even for those brought up on the Wailers, Desmond Dekker and Black Uhuru. But for all its challenges, this is an absorbing and compelling novel. It is a modern gothic nightmare, conjuring recent pasts: ghetto wars, American adventurism in Latin America, narcotics wars, even the New York gay scene of the 1980s. It is full of unpalatable truths. Just as Hilary Mantel evokes the tragedies of Tudor England, even the most brutal actors get a hearing. (Christopher Johnson, Energy Community Editor) "THE YEAR OF THE RUNAWAYS" - SUNJEEV SAHOTA In his "The Year of the Runaways", Sunjeev Sahota writes clear, compelling prose. He has a sense of pace and drama. He knows his milieus, mostly India and northern England. And his story is almost urgently up to date, although that appears to be largely a matter of luck. Sahota describes how and why people emigrate to another country, in this case leaving India for England. The immigration status of his four main characters - three men and a woman - are all on shaky legal ground once they arrive. Much of the novel concerns how they survive, working in the underground economy and keeping one eye on the door in case the police come through it. Their story is not as obviously tragic as that of the refugees from the Middle East and Africa crowding into Europe. But Sahota is good at showing how they're similar. Nobody opts to leave his home and family if he has any choice. Sahota's characters cannot find jobs in India, or at least not jobs that pay enough to support their extended families, an obligation that is just part of a web of social expectations that both constrains and drives them. The novel has shortcomings. Sahota writes well, but sometimes he keeps on writing. As his characters make the rounds looking for work, we hear about each rejection, each stop at a corner to look for an address, each awful takeout meal. The right detail is telling; too many details become tiresome. He also seems to assume his readers are familiar with India's languages, particularly their slang, its religions and its intricate society with all the complications of caste and ethnicity. Readers who lack that may feel they are missing out. The epilogue might also strike some as overly sunny, describing how not all his characters' dreams come true, but neither do they sink into abject misery. After putting them through hell for 455 pages, perhaps it was the least he could do. (Larry King, EMEA Desk Editor) "A LITTLE LIFE" - HANYA YANAGHIHARA There is nothing small about "A Little Life," the second novel of American author Hanya Yanaghihara. Set in New York, it tells the tale of four college friends as they move to the big city and spread their wings after graduation. The story follows gentle, determined Willem, an aspiring actor; the talented, but abrasive artist JB; Malcolm, the solemn architect and the enigmatic Jude, a brilliant lawyer, whose traumatic childhood delivers ever more painful scars to both his body and his mind. As the decades pass and their careers take off, their friendships deepen and darken, as they grapple with ambition, success, tragedy and addiction. The story pivots around Jude and the dark secrets of his upbringing that he struggles to conceal. The strands of his friends' lives are woven around his, the magnet that draws an increasingly disparate group of men together. The shifting backdrops are as much a part of the book as the four men, as the story flows through New York, along the grimy backstreets of Tribeca, or the cutting-edge lofts in Soho's cast iron district, or the leafy elegance of Boston's Cambridge suburb, each defining a chapter in the characters' lives. Yanaghihara's narrative explores love and loyalty with the same intensity as it does betrayal and loss, in a riveting epic that will draw you in from the first page and keep you reading long after midnight. (Amanda Cooper, Senior Correspondent, Oil Markets) "SATIN ISLAND" - TOM MCCARTHY What you make of British literary provocateur Tom McCarthy's "Satin Island" may depend on your tolerance for being mocked for falling for the factoids the Internet dangles in front of our eyes every day. That is what McCarthy, whose debut novel "Remainder" (2005) made a big splash in the English-language fiction world, does in this slim (by today's standards, at under 200 pages) volume. His main character, named only by the initial "U." - a hint that this is a mirror-image look at ourselves - is an ethnographer in the mold of Claude Levi-Strauss, the French anthropologist who maintained human traits are the same in savage and civilised societies. In this mostly plotless book, U works for a large, nebulous corporation that helps other corporations and governments to better understand - and profit from or control - human behaviour. His gaze - and hence the reader's - wanders anywhere, from the possibility that parachutists have a suicide cult to the "cargo cult" worship of World War Two cargo airlifts on the Pacific island of Vanuatu. The mammoth Fresh Kills Landfill on Staten Island (note the similarity to the title), used as the burial pit for the Twin Towers' rubble following the 911 attacks, comes into view after U has a dream about a garbage island. On a business trip to New York, he takes the subway to lower Manhattan and queues for the Staten Island ferry. To say what happens might be deemed a spoiler, but suffice it to say that the joke is on U. (Michael Roddy, Entertainment Editor for Europe) (Editing by Michael Roddy and Tom Heneghan)