The Irish writer Colm Tóibín has been shortlisted for this year's Man Booker Prize for his fifth novel, The Master.
The six-strong shortlist was announced in London yesterday. It marks the second time Tóibín has been shortlisted, having been among the runners-up in 1999 for his previous novel, The Blackwater Lightship.
Also shortlisted are four English writers, Alan Hollinghurst for his fourth novel, The Line of Beauty; David Mitchell for his third novel, Cloud Atlas, one of the pre-Booker favourites; Gerard Woodward for his second novel, I'll Go To Bed At Noon; this year's youngest contender, 30-year-old Sarah Hall, for The Electric Michelangelo; and the South African novelist Achmat Dangor for Bitter Fruit.
Having received outstanding reviews on publication earlier this year, Tóibín's elegant period novel is an expected Booker contender and would certainly be regarded as the finest literary novel on the shortlist.
His fellow Irish writer, Ronan Bennett, who was also longlisted last month, seemed an equally likely finalist. The omission of Bennett's Havoc in Its Third Year, a dramatic allegorical work about guilt and fear in 17th century Puritan England, has disappointed critics who have praised it as an important and powerful work.
For Tóibín, the strongest challenge should come from David Mitchell's Cloud Atlas. The Master draws on the life and experiences of the US master Henry James, who spent most of his life in Europe. James emerges as a complex, diffident individual.
At no time does Tóibín attempt to climb inside the mind, yet he certainly achieves a sense of what it was to be alive for a single man, an artist and consummate observer, in the closing years of the 19th century.
It is a narrative of dramatic set pieces, inspired by specific episodes in the life of James, whose private life was shaded in ambiguities. Tóibín also recreates a sense of the London, Venice, Florence and English countryside in which James lived.
Should he emerge as winner when the £50,000 prize is announced next month, he would be only the second Irish writer to take the Booker, which Roddy Doyle won in 1993 with Paddy Clarke Ha! Ha! Ha!
The books and their authors: page 13