The Mookse and the Gripes discussion

Maps of Our Spectacular Bodies by Maddie Mortimer (Picador)

I am taking the credit here.

I did admit to the chair of judges that I wasn’t a big fan. But i said you were and that generally people would be delighted to see it.

As I said I may possibly have urged a judge to read this many months ago

Another Goldsmith tradition here - the Booker longlisted but not shortlisted book

This would be a good book to bring the Goldsmith to a wider audience. We all love Waidner, but their avant-garde style is never going to be widely popular. Maps is both different enough in form to qualify as a Goldsmith book and “readable,” making it appealing to more readers.

Was interesting (particularly given the history of the prize and it’s reaction to one particular Booker) that readable was something one of the judges mentioned generally for all of the books, although books that might take more care to read that conventional novels. Ie readable but not zipalongable.

Don’t have the exact quote - think it was in the physical New Statesman but isn’t on line.

From the print edition (written by Tom Gatti)

In 2011, when the judges of the Booker Prize said they wanted to reward "readability", a literary skirmish broke out. Although in the age of bitter online culture wars the controversy now seems quaint, it opened up a serious question. What do we want from a novel? Should it do more than just "zip along"?

Two years later, an answer to this question was offered by the Goldsmiths Prize, co-founded by Goldsmiths University and the New Statesman and conceived to reward authors using language and form in audacious new ways. Now in its tenth year, the prize - judged by the novelists Natasha Brown and Ali Smith, the prize's director, Dr Tim Parnell, and me - revealed its shortlist of six novels on 5 October (the winner will
be announced on 10 November).

The list features a coming-of-age story stripped down to a series of gleaming vignettes (Somebody Loves. You by Mona Arshi); a visionary train journey (Helen
Oyeyemi's Peaces) and a large-hearted novel ofsisterhood and resistance encompassing 2020s London
and 1960s Brazil (There Are More Things by YaraRodrigues Fowler). In Maps of Our Spectacular Bodies, Maddie Mortimer finds a wild, transfixing voice for the cancer roaming inside her protagonist, while Seven
Steeples by Sara Baume records in high-definition detail the domestic existence of a couple who have fled to rural Ireland. Finally, Diego Garcia is a collaboration between Natasha Soobramanien and Luke Williams,
who have channelled a political protest about colonial injustice into a novel quite unlike any other.

Together these books form a snapshot of the most exciting fiction emerging from Britain and Ireland today. They may ask for a little more of your attention than others. But "readable"? Yes, and moreover: essential.

Thanks. Given I read it briefly in the library (aka WHSmiths) my recollected summary was quite good.

I was going to buy it but it seemed to be the house mag of the evil anti-growth coalition.

Well that’s a first. An author being very excited to meet a reader “OMG, I am obsessed with you”

(Not me I hasten to add but Gumble. Indeed I had to beat a hasty retreat in case she recognised me from my review)

Maddie Mortimer?

Yes. To Gumble.

That was definitely a first. She has read my review 3 times - twice when she wanted to cheer herself up - and had always hoped one day to meet me. So nice. Makes reviewing and championing books worthwhile.

Fortunately the Diego Garcia authors didn’t recognise you (and she didn’t recognise me!)

But it was a lovely moment.

That’s nice and that’s why if I don’t have anything nice to say about a book whose author is living I don’t say anything.

That's very nice, GY :)

Now the author is nominated for the 2022 Sunday Times Charlotte Aitken Young Writer of the Year Award

Gumble's Yard - Golden Reviewer wrote: "Now the author is nominated for the 2022 Sunday Times Charlotte Aitken Young Writer of the Year Award"

Slightly ashamed to say I hadn't heard of any of the others

The Katherine Rundell book won the Bailie Gifford prize and was in every end of year best book list I saw (other than those purely fictional). Interestingly she is very well known to those with children for a book called Rooftoppers which won several book awards a few years back.

Rundell's prose style glitters and fizzes - as a PhD student, though, she really doesn't yet have anything new to say about Donne in Super-Infinite: The Transformations of John Donne.

Tom Benn's Oxblood got a bit of buzz last year.

Lucy Burn's Larger than an Orange feels a bit sub-Annie Ernaux - not The Years but Happening/L'événement.

Oxblood was longlisted for last year’s Gordon burn