26th July, 2011

The Last Hundred Days long-listed for Man Booker Prize 2011

First time novelist Patrick McGuinness is one of the Man Booker dozen on the longlist for the Man Booker Prize 2011 for fiction announced today.

The Last Hundred Days a literary spy thriller and novel of place, is set in 1989 Bucharest, in the last days of Ceasescu and creates a world of intensity and ravaged beauty as the demolition squads race to destroy the old city and replace it with a sinister Stalinist Legoland. Into this paranoia walks a young English student with a damaged past and an uncertain future to take up a job he never applied for and whose duties are never made clear. He finds dissidents, party apparatchiks, black-marketeers, diplomats, spies and ordinary Romanians, all watching each other as Europe’s most paranoid regime plays out its bloody endgame.

“We are absolutely delighted for Patrick,” said Seren fiction editor Penny Thomas. “This is a stunning debut novel and we are so pleased that it has been recognised by the Man Booker judges. It’s also excellent news for a small independent Welsh press such as Seren.’

The full longlist is:

• Julian Barnes  The Sense of an Ending
• Sebastian Barry On Canaan’s Side
• Carol Birch Jamrach’s Menagerie
• Patrick deWitt The Sisters Brothers
• Esi Edugyan Half Blood Blues
• Yvette Edwards A Cupboard Full of Coats
• Alan Hollinghurst The Stranger’s Child
• Stephen Kelman  Pigeon English
• Patrick McGuinness The Last Hundred Days
• AD Miller Snowdrops
• Alison Pick Far to Go
• Jane Rogers The Testament of Jessie Lamb
• DJ Taylor Derby Day

Patrick McGuinness, poet and Professor or Literature at Oxford University, lived in Romania in the years leading up to the revolution.

The Last Hundred Days is available at www.serenbooks.com at £8.99