The Shortlisted and the Short shrifted

The MAN Booker Prize Shortlist for 2007 was announced yesterday . The six titles shortlisted are:

* Darkmans by Nicola Barker
* The Gathering by Anne Enright
* The Reluctant Fundamentalist by Mohsin Hamid
* Mister Pip by Lloyd Jones
* On Chesil Beach by Ian McEwan
* Animal’s People by Indra Sinha

Reactions have been mixed, mostly negative. Ian McEwan is the only established author from the list , and has been the bookies favourite all along.

The Long list itself was rather controversial, what with well known authors like Sebastian Faulks and J.M. Coetzee being left out and virtual unknowns entering the race.

The Telegraph reports that :

" While McEwan's novella, On Chesil Beach, has been a runaway commercial success, selling more than 100,000 copies, one of his rivals for the prize, Animal's People, loosely based on the Bhopal chemical plant explosion, by the Indian author Indra Sinha, had sold just 231 copies in this country by mid-August, 10 days after its sales were supposedly given a major boost by being longlisted.

Nicola Barker's Darkmans had sold only 499 copies. Anne Enright's The Gathering had fared a little better with sales of 834 sales, Mister Pip had sales of 880 and of McEwan's rivals, only Pakistani author Mohsin Hamid's The Reluctant Fundamentalist broke the four-figure barrier, with 1,519 readers buying it. "