Prizes

With the hindsight of history, the Booker misses plenty of tricks. In 1986, The Handmaid’s Tale, one of the most vital and prescient works of modern fiction, was pipped to the prize by Kingsley Amis’s The Old Devils. With Margaret Atwood now elevated to the status of a contemporary prophet, 2019 may have seemed like an opportunity to redress that mistake.  Read more

Twenty years before Peter Handke would become a Nobel laureate, he won another title. In 1999, Salman Rushdie named him the runner-up for "International moron of the year" in the Guardian, for his "series of impassioned apologias for the genocidal regime of Slobodan Milošević". (The winner was actor Charlton Heston, for being a gun lobbyist.)  Read more

In an accelerated age, the best response is to take your time. There is no choice with Ducks, Newburyport, Lucy Ellmann's 1,000-page plus novel, shortlisted on Tuesday for the 2019 Booker prize. A bewildering feat of simultaneous compression and expansion, it takes us into the mind of an Ohio housewife as her thoughts run wild - from the state of the nation to the minutiae of daily life.  Read more

The Testaments by Margaret Atwood (Vintage, Chatto & Windus)

The plot: Under lock and key until publication day on 10 September, The Testaments is set 15 years after the end of The Handmaid's Tale and follows the lives of three women in Gilead.

What we said: Nothing yet! But it is set to be one of the biggest books of the year.

Rape, infighting, secrets, financial malpractice; the scandal surrounding the Nobel Prize in Literature began in November 2017 when Swedish newspaper Dagens Nyheter published allegations by eighteen women that they had been sexually assaulted by Jean-Claude Arnault, a 71-year-old Swedish-French photographer.  Read more