A first novel by a former soldier as well as works by two other Irish writers, including Colum McCann, are among the 147 novels long-listed for the €100,000 2005 International IMPAC Dublin Literary Award. Eileen Battersby, Literary Correspondent, reports.
The list, which was announced in Dublin yesterday, offers an exciting mix of novels ranging from the 1999 Nobel Literature Laureate, Günter Grass's superb late work, Crabwalk, to Man Booker winner DBC Pierre's Vernon God Little, to Whitbread victor Mark Haddon's The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time, the great US writer Tobias Wolff's Old School and popular thriller The Da Vinci Code by Dan Brown.
Mr Martin Malone from Kildare town, now living in Newbridge, served with the military police in Lebanon.
His novel, The Broken Cedar, tells the story of a young man's attempt to unravel the mystery surrounding the death 20 years earlier of his father, an Irish soldier, hanged along with two comrades in the Lebanon. Although two of the bodies were found, the man, now also a soldier, wants to find out what happened. This is a book with quite a twist which was well received on publication.
As one of the most established of the younger generation of Irish writers, Colum McCann was seen to have made a major breakthrough with Dancer, a novel based on the life and experiences of ballet star Rudolph Nureyev.
Gerard Donovan's Schopenhauer's Telescope, long-listed for last year's Booker Prize, is a work of immense philosophical sophistication.
It takes the Holocaust as its theme and develops into a metaphysical meditation, taking the form of a wary conversation between two men, one of whom watches as the other digs a grave.
In addition to Tobias Wolff, US fiction is well represented by 42 other American writers including Louise Erdrich for The Master Butcher's Singing Club, her finest book for several years, as well as former Pulitzer Prize winner Jane Smiley, Paul Auster, his wife Siri Hustvedt, Nicholson Baker and Richard Powers.
Two of Australia's elite writers are included - double Booker winner Peter Carey and the veteran Shirley Hazzard, whose first novel in 20 years, The Great Fire, an eloquent study of the legacy of conflict, won the US National Book Award and was also long-listed for this year's Booker prize.
Several of the best of recent British fiction feature including Jonathan Raban's Waxwings, Graham Swift's The Light of Day, Monica Ali's engaging debut Brick Lane, Julie Myerson's thriller Something Might Happen, and the always underestimated Anita Brookner's characteristically astute The Rules of Engagement. Two excellent British novels, Tim Parks's Judge Savage, an extraordinary portrait of a not very sympathetic man in turmoil, and Caryl Phillips's powerful and understated A Distant Shore, have been recognised by readers, to compensate for the critics having overlooked them.
No literary list seems complete without Canadian Margaret Atwood, one of the world's most widely read and nominated authors. Her 2003 Man Booker contender, the futuristic fable Oryx and Crake, has been nominated, as has Afghan writer Khaled Hosseini's The Kite Runner. The shortlist of 10 will be announced on March 8th.
Grass looks a strong bet to be joined by South African Damon Galgut's 2003 Booker contender, The Good Doctor, with its oblique echoes of Graham Greene, and the international bestseller, Soldiers of Salamis, written by the Spaniard Javier Cercas.