Well, the buzz this week is another Man Booker Prize upset. Anne Enright won for her novel The Gathering. Ian McEwan’s On Chesil Beach was the heavy, but late in the game odds were moving towards Lloyd Jones’ Mr. Pip. So Enright’s win came as a bit of a surprise. Booker judge Howard Davies took the opportunity to chastise book reviewers for being too reverential when writing about the works of established authors and overlooking the works of relatively unknown authors such as Enright and the other shortlisted author Indra Sinha, whose novel Animal’s People has not yet been published in the US.

I haven’t had a chance to read The Gathering yet, but have heard very good things about it. The story of a dysfunctional Irish family congregating at the death of one of the children, it has been called “exhilaratingly bleak.” We’ve got a few left in stock and the publisher will have a reprint back in stores in about a week and a half.

As for what I've been reading... well, I just finished Per Petterson's Out Stealing Horses and I absolutely loved it. It is a short, quiet novel that tells the story of Trond Sander as he gets situated in a sort of self-imposed exile in a little cabin on the eastern edge of Norway. This exemption and the interruption by an all too familiar neighbor take him on a journey to the summer of 1948. His reflections begin with the exciting, youthful delinquency of Trond and his friend Jon as they go out for a pre-dawn joy-ride on the neighboring farm’s horses, but turn to loss and cruelty that is further explored in the parallel stories of this transformative summer of his youth and his current encroachment on winter.