Man Booker shortlist 2015: is this the most diverse lineup ever?

So a panel that, as Booker tradition requires, contains three middle-aged white males – chairman Michael Wood, John Burnside and Sam Leith – have come up with a shortlist that includes only one novelist who mirrors them. Like Edward St Aubyn in 2006 and Will Self in 2012, Tom McCarthy is the last MAWM left standing; he is also the sole mid-career author and previous shortlistee. After a brutal cull of eminent entrants, past winners among them, in their 40s, 50s and 60s at the longlist and shortlist stages, there is a striking disparity in experience between Anne Tyler, shortlisted for her 20th and possibly last book, and the remaining four finalists with eight novels between them.

Whatever the explanation of this slaughter of the seasoned – did the old guard all underperform, or was there a bias towards new faces and fiction? – the result could well be, in terms of ethnicity and age-range at least, the most diverse shortlist ever. Marlon James is the Booker’s first Jamaican shortlistee and would be the first African-Caribbean winner. Chigozie Obioma, 28 (with Eleanor Catton, the joint youngest finalist), would be the first Nigerian winner since Ben Okri in 1991 and joins another short list: in a prize that has been scandalously reluctant to appoint non-white judges – Ellah Wakatama Allfrey this year appears to be only the fourth – just four black authors from sub-Saharan Africa have reached this stage before him.

Derby-born Sunjeev Sahota would be the first UK-native British winner from any ethnic minority (VS Naipaul and Salman Rushdie, in contrast, were born abroad), and the first maths graduate to triumph since JM Coetzee. The short-odds favourite Hanya Yanagihara would be the first author of east Asian heritage to win since Kazuo Ishiguro in 1989, and she or Tyler would of course be the first American winner (as a magazine journalist, she would arguably be also the first winner with a “real”, non-literary job since Roddy Doyle, unless Arundhati Roy’s aerobics teaching qualifies). At 73, Tyler would probably be the venerable award’s oldest winner, as even the Dumbledore-esque William Golding was a mere 69 when he saw off a furious Anthony Burgess in 1980.

However, the shortlist’s rainbow-like appearance is somewhat deceptive, since (as Philip Hensher noted on Twitter, grumpily adding “told you so”) “four out of six of Booker shortlist American or America-residing novelists” – James and Obioma both have US academic posts, joining the two women – while the other pair are Brits. And if you take away the 70s Jamaica of A Brief History of Seven Killings and the 90s Nigeria of The Fishermen, plus The Year of the Runaways’ Indian flashbacks, what’s left suddenly looks distinctly narrow in focus and familiar: a 200-mile stretch of the US east coast (Tyler’s Baltimore, Yanagihara’s New York) and two cities in England’s eastern half (McCarthy’s London, Sahota’s Sheffield) linked by 180 miles of the M1.

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Secret Garden Coloring Book Sells 3M Copies in China

Johanna Basford’s popular adult coloring book, Secret Garden, has sold more than three million copies in China alone in less than three months, the publisher Laurence King Publishing revealed this week.

The book has been quite successful around the globe, but the Chinese success is unparalleled. The Guardian has the scoop:

As the Beijing international book fair takes place this week, Laurence King Publishing said that Secret Garden had sold 6.8m copies around the world, with 3m of these sales in China, where it was published on 1 June. The title has also been a major hit in Brazil, where it has sold just over 1.1m copies, said Laurence King, with 650,421 copies sold in the US, half a million in South Korea, and 477,658 in the UK to date.

Edge of the World by Michael Powell – a gripping voyage into the past

It starts, as great voyages perhaps should always do, with a ship crawling through the thick fog. “Where bound, Captain?” comes the deep voice of the Aberdeen harbour-master across the water.

“Lerwick,” replies the captain of the Vedra through his megaphone. The man standing next to him, a then-unknown British film director called Michael Powell, grabs the megaphone and shouts, “AND THE ISLAND OF FOULA!” Below decks, in the ship’s saloon, a film crew lounges around looking, as Powell puts it with a director’s eye “like a scene from one of those American films where the whole cast is catching the Last Express from Shanghai”.

Adventure story ... a still from The Edge of the World (1937). Photograph: Everett/Rex/Shutterstock

It had all started six years earlier in 1930, when Powell had stumbled across a short article in the Observer about the then-ongoing evacuation of St Kilda and decided it was the perfect subject for the film to make his name. He was, of course, destined to become one of the titans of postwar British film, with classics such as A Matter of Life and Death and Peeping Tom. But this account of the making of his first major film, also called The Edge of the World, is something else entirely – an inadvertently fresh and racy portrait of prewar Britain.

The poignant story of the Scottish island of St Kilda – stranded dozens of miles west of the Scottish mainland – would, alone, fill several books (indeed it has). The islanders lived in virtual isolation for centuries until the military arrived during the first world war, forcing them to accept that that their world was obsolete, and eventually prompting their migration. The dramatic potential of the story itself is obvious – but Powell’s book about the obstacles he faced to get the film made, many of which would have overwhelmed a less resourceful and determined person, has its own gripping hold.

Powell’s plan, in 1936, when he was finally ready to make his film, was to shoot on St Kilda itself, and his script was designed to accommodate the dramatic landscape and buildings. He duly assembled his cast and crew, only to have the island’s owner – terrified of the effect a film crew might have on the place – withdraw permission at the last minute. Faced with finding another location within 24 hours or abandoning the film, Powell was pointed towards another possible candidate: an island to the west of Shetland called Foula. Having adapted his script and reassembled his crew, Powell and his gang set off on what turned out to be as much an adventure as a film shoot.

Powell’s tale really gets going in the second part, when the crew is finally ensconced in Shetland and ready to film. Offering glimpses of what would make him such an innovative film-maker during his later collaborations with Emeric Pressburger, Powell eschews the customary dictatorial role of director and inaugurates a democratic “parliament” in the camp. His tale of living and working together, an embryonic version of the “castaway”-style reality shows, is magical, and there’s even a final-act real-life drama to round things off.

Nobody would accuse Powell, on the strength of this book, of being a literary stylist, but the fog-bound world he conjures up, and the wonderful cast of characters he encounters, from grumpy landowners to enterprising journalists, makes for a gripping portrait of another time and place.

The Selected Letters of Charles Dickens review – the man behind the novels

Charles Dickens, who burned thousands of his letters. Photograph: AP

On 19 April 1842, while in Cincinnati, Charles Dickens wrote a brief note to Rebecca Nichols, thanking her for her letter about The Old Curiosity Shop. It goes, in full:

    My Dear Madam,
    I am very much obliged to you for your beautiful lines on the death of Nell, which I have read with great interest and pleasure.
    Believe me
    Faithfully Yours
    CHARLES DICKENS.

The footnote gives us the context:

    Rebecca Nichols (1819-1903), poet and newspaper editor, then living in Cincinnati. Her poem, commemorating Nell in spring, summer and autumn, began: “Spring, with breezes cool and airy, / Opened on a little fairy.”

In those few lines we can see what a good editor Professor Jenny Hartley is. First, she has included Dickens’s letter, which does not, on the face of it, look interesting at all, except perhaps as an indication of his politeness to his public. Second, she has looked up the poem that occasioned the reply. This isn’t hard to do, thanks to the digitising efforts of the Library of Congress, but she could still have thought her time better spent elsewhere. And third: she quotes all she has to of the poem, without comment. (It goes on in the same vein, but those opening lines are, you will agree, special; the guffaw that exploded from me as I read them made me think of Oscar Wilde’s famous remark that one must have a heart of stone to read the death of Little Nell without laughing.) Then you imagine Dickens himself reading this rubbish and realising he was going to have to say something nice about it; and then, perhaps, rolling his eyes before putting pen to paper. While we’re at it, we can pause to reflect on Nichols’s world, and her delight in receiving a note from the great man, unless a corner of her mind registered the faint possibility of sarcasm (“believe me”).

Extracting this much from six lines isn’t bad going, and when you think that Hartley had to plough through the 12 huge volumes of Dickens’s surviving letters to make her selection (he burned thousands more, but in an age when Londoners could expect a reply from a letter within two hours, inevitably many escaped the bonfire), your admiration for her grows deeper and deeper.

The letter I quoted is not, of course, representative. There are others that are less ambiguous or formal. It’s hard to say which are my favourites: they are all, in their way, good. Dickens was not known for his restraint in his exploration of the rhetorical potential of the English language, and reading this book is like listening to the work of an already uninhibited court maestro who has been let further off the leash.

The reason Dickens tended to burn his letters was, he said, because they captured him at unguarded moments – and they are all the better for it. We get an anonymously written letter about the exploitation of women and children by mine-owners prior to the Mines and Collieries Act of 1842, for publication in the Morning Chronicle, which has lines you could quote today that would shame our government with their articulate fury. There’s a letter in which he describes being visited in a dream by the “Spirit” of his dead daughter, Mary, and asking her which is the true religion, or whether they are all true (the right religion for Dickens, he is told, is Catholicism, which made me raise an eyebrow). Another describes him taking round water in his hat and brandy from his flask to the injured and dying victims of the 1865 Staplehurst train crash, which he was in with his mistress, Ellen Ternan, and her mother. There are musings about works that have been sidelined (such as Master Humphrey’s Clock, a weekly periodical written entirely by Dickens for a year and a half), and also about whether to murder Chapman and Hall, his publishers. In short, the whole book bursts with the author’s energy, and you will love him and know him better after reading even a few of these letters. If you don’t buy it now, or put it on your Christmas list, it can only be because you already have a copy.

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Mrs Engels by Gavin McCrea review – a symphony out of historical silence

A few families possess paper records stretching back through the centuries, but for most of us, family history is handed down from mouth to ear. These stories illuminate the past with a particular, fitful brilliance, but much is left in the dark. This darkness is both a gift to a novelist and a daunting responsibility. When a writer claims to speak for an illiterate woman who lived in the mid-19th century, to what extent will he overlay her story with his own preconceptions?

Although Gavin McCrea’s first novel is set in the circles of Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels, this is not their story, and it does not flatter them. Engels and Marx left copious records behind them, but were unable to describe how they themselves might appear to a member of the working class, still less to a woman of that class. Nor did they tell the history of two sisters born in Manchester of Irish descent, Mary and Lizzie (Lydia) Burns, although both women were closely connected with Engels and Marx for many years. Neither sister left any account of their lives, but in Mrs Engels they step forward to dominate the narrative.

Stepping out of the shadows of time … Lizzie Burns c1865 

McCrea’s narrator is the younger, Lizzie (pictured), who was born in 1827. According to Marx’s daughter Eleanor, Lizzie “was illiterate and could not read or write but she was true, honest and in some ways as fine-souled a woman as you could meet”. Like her elder sister Mary, Lizzie worked in a cotton mill. Mary met Engels when he was sent to work at the family firm of Engels & Ermen in Manchester, and she entered into a relationship with him which lasted until her death at the age of 40. Some historians detect her influence on Engels’ The Condition of the English Working Class, which deals with the industrial working class of Manchester and Liverpool and describes in some detail the district of Manchester known as Little Ireland. The Burns sisters knew about poverty, child labour and slum housing from the inside, and would have made valuable guides for a middle-class son of a factory owner. “Some 4,000 people, mostly Irish, inhabit this slum ... Heaps of refuse, offal and sickening filth are everywhere interspersed with pools of stagnant liquid. The atmosphere is polluted by the stench and is darkened by the thick smoke of a dozen factory chimneys.”

Mrs Engels moves back and forwards in time, between the earlier days in Manchester and the later years after Mary’s death, when Lizzie becomes Engels’s partner in her sister’s stead and moves with him to Primrose Hill. From the outside, she appears secure, but inside she is torn, even tormented by the contradictions of her life. The Engels and Marx menages are funded by reserves of family money. Refugees from the French Commune pack the drawing room, swallowing fine wines faster than they can be brought up from the cellar. The Marxes’ servant, Nim, is the single mother of a child whose father Lizzie believes to be Engels. Jenny Marx, with three surviving children out of seven born, is obsessed with the future marriages of her girls. Meanwhile, Lizzie is in contact with the Fenian movement through a former lover. This whirlwind of politics and personalities might become dizzying were it not stabilised by Lizzie’s unmistakable voice. She begins life by grabbing what she needs in order to survive; she ends it having achieved deep self-knowledge. She tells her own story with a fierce wit and trenchancy, shot through with poetry.

The historical Lizzie tells us nothing. Was she, as McCrea suggests, made infertile after infection with syphilis, or did she make sure, in one way or another, that no children were born to her? Did she hold on to enough of her faith to see, at the closing of the coffin that held her sister’s body, “how her hollowness and ash turned to a radiance that the oils and the candles couldn’t fully explain”? No one will ever know, but McCrea’s fictional speculation makes a fine symphony out of the silence that surrounds Lizzie Burns.