The chances of the first home winner of the International Impac Dublin Literary Award look strong after the announcement of this year's diverse shortlist.
Included among the 10 contenders named yesterday in Dublin are two prominent Irish novels, a third book written in Italian by a Dubliner who now lives in Italy, as well as outstanding fiction from Denmark, Nigeria and Malaysia. A Pakistani based in London is the writer they all must beat.
As expected Colm Tóibín's The Master, a fictionalised version of the life of novelist Henry James, shortlisted for the 2004 Man Booker prize, and Ronan Bennett's powerful allegorical study of fear and mistrust, Havoc, in its Third Year which was longlisted for the same award, have both been selected. Tóibín should have won the 2004 Man Booker Prize; he will find this a tougher battle as Nadeem Aslam, Pakistani-born and London-based, will impress with Maps for Lost Lovers, a dramatic and courageous narrative about a Pakistani community in Britain, which was also longlisted for the 2004 Man Booker prize.
The appearance of Dublin-born Margaret Mazzantini's confessional thriller Don't Move, written in Italian, in which a successful surgeon tells his story, is best described as a shock, as is the inclusion of Jonathan Coe's The Close Circle, a slickly satirical state-of-contemporary-England romp. No US writers feature. Neither Marilynne Robinson's magnificent Pulitzer Prize-winning Gilead, nor Chang-rae Lee's Aloft, with its echoes of Updike and Ford, made the shortlist.
Impac invariably alerts readers to outstanding foreign language work. This year's revelation is Danish writer Jens Christian Grondahl's third book, An Altered Light, translated by Anne Born. It is an intense study of one woman's life as it begins to unravel, and in its unravelling, multiple truths emerge. It should not win, but it is a major book which will now be read by a wide audience.
The same applies to Nigerian poet and novelist Chris Abani's pulsating Graceland and Malaysian Vyvyane Loh's debut Breaking the Tongue, which plots a young Chinese man's coming of age against the backdrop of the second World War. Both of these novels will gain hugely from being Impac shortlisted. They are important books, as is The Swallows of Kabul by Mohammed Moulessehoul. He is an Algerian army officer, using a female nom de plume, Yasmina Khadra, when telling the story of Afghanistan under Taliban terror. It is a vivid, shocking narrative but the theatrical prose and its cliched, forced lyricism tend to intrude.
The ghosts of Borges and the great WG Sebald hover over Canadian Thomas Wharton's ambitious curiosity of a book, The Logogryph - subtitled A Bibliography of Imaginary Books - in which the art and sheer enigma of reading are explored. It is an engaging, at times convoluted performance. But Tóibín's polished narrative must resume battle with Bennett and Aslam. Maps for Lost Lovers should win this prize.
