Still, for close on 50 years, Man Booker’s quixotic efforts have made surprisingly good sense of a difficult, even impossible enterprise. Taste and judgment aside, the other intractable dimension of the Booker conundrum is its annual rendezvous with the marketplace. Inevitably, Auster’s book towers over Emily Fridlund’s History of Wolves (Weidenfeld), an enigmatic coming-of-age novel set on the edge of a lake in the American midwest. Which brings us to the big American challenger here, Lincoln in the Bardo by George Saunders (Bloomsbury), the bookies’ favourite. Autumn is a bittersweet tour de force set in “the worst of times” – Brexit Britain – and interweaving art, death and the mysteries of love.

Source: The Guardian October 15, 2017 08:15 UTC