Bookies rate the Man Booker's six shortlisted novels
James Kidd looks at the bookies' odds for the six novels on the Man Booker shortlist and puts his money down
This year welcomed an all-new Technicolor (as opposed to Technicolour) Man Booker Prize: for the first time, American novelists Joshua Ferris, Karen Joy Fowler, Richard Powers and Siri Hustvedt rubbed book spines with writers from Britain and the Commonwealth - the Davids Mitchell and Nicholls, Ali Smith, Howard Jacobson and Richard Flanagan to name a few.
And that was just the start of the longlist drama. While Donna Tartt's heralded The Goldfinch didn't warrant a nomination, Paul Kingsnorth's The Wake made the list despite being released by "crowd-funded" publisher Unbound. The inclusion of the popular and populist Nicholls raised eyebrows for those looking to bash the Man Booker's recent commercial bent, but at least it suggested the heavyweight judging panel - filled with academics and literary journalists and chaired by philosopher A.C. Grayling - was not above narrative enjoyment.
The shortlist controversy began when early favourite Mitchell and The Bone Clocks disappeared. "It is a little bit of a … gentle torture to be longlisted," Mitchell tells me on the eve of the shortlist announcement. "You get woken up in the middle of the night by a little voice saying, 'You might win the Booker'."
Five of the final six nominees were apparently rapidly agreed upon, with one author causing dissent. One wonders whether this might have been the surprise entry, Fowler's We are All Completely Beside Ourselves (my favourite of the six). Here, in alphabetical order, are 2014's runners and writers, and the bookmakers' odds of them winning.
by Joshua Ferris (Penguin)
William Hill: 8-1; Coral: 9-1
The first of two Americans to make the list, Ferris might already have won a Man Booker if his splendid debut, Then We Came to the End, had been eligible seven years ago. After the underwhelming The Unnamed, his third novel is an ultimately uneven brew of contemporary satire and religious-philosophical exploration that begins in Paul O'Rourke's dental practice in Manhattan. The betting suggests Ferris is an outsider and I will eat my copy if they are wrong.