Neel Mukherjee shortlisted for Man Booker 2014
The novel The Lives Of Others is about a labourer's struggle to feed his family set against a turbulent backdrop of 1960s India.
Kolkata-born, London-based writer Neel Mukherjee's novelThe Lives of Others has been shortlisted for the 2014 Man Booker Prize.
Last year's shortlist had Jhumpa Lahiri's The Lowland which captured that instance when the violence of Naxalbari permanently stains the lives of a handful of people. Lahiri's novel traced those lives from Calcutta to Rhode Island in the US.
Mukherjee's novel too goes back to an old Calcutta - of the 1960s - with its impoverished farmers and privileged zamindars and the fissures that finally have the people convulsing in the Naxalbari revolution.
Can Mukherjee's Calcutta novel do what Lahiri's didn't - win the Man Booker?
This is the first time that the prize is open to writers outside the Commonwealth, causing much kerfuffle about the possibility of Americans taking over the Man Booker Prize. The final six, however, have only two US authors -- Joshua Ferris, for To Rise Again at a Decent Hour, and Karen Joy Fowler, for We are Completely Beside Ourselves. They and Mukherjee are up against Howard Jacobson's J, Ali Smith's How to be Both? and Australian writer Richard Flanagan's The Narrow Road to the Deep South.
Forty-something Mukherjee said in a statement released by his publisher Penguin Random House: "I am absolutely delighted to be shortlisted. It is a great and singular honour to be amongst the other authors on the list."
According to the Man Booker website, the judges will now re-read the shortlisted books to select the winner, whose name will be revealed on October 14 at London's Guildhall.