THE 146-STRONG longlist for the 2009 Impac Dublin International Literary Award was announced in Dublin yesterday and carries with it a buoyant message of hope - forget the recession and get busy reading.
Two Irish writers, 2007 Man Booker winner Anne Enright and Joseph O'Connor feature alongside expected international names such as the veteran Peruvian Mario Vargas Llosa, Doris Lessing and US writers Don De Lillo, Philip Roth - albeit at his most lethargic - and the indefatigable Joyce Carol Oates.
Also included is Ian McEwan for On Chesil Beach, the great South African Nobel Prize winner, JM Coetzee for his only poor book, Diary of a Bad Year, Canadian-based Michael Ondaatje with Divisaderoand US writer David Leavitt for The Indian Clerk.
It is also exciting to see the gifted Scot AL Kennedy nominated for Day as well as Peter Ho Davis's The Welsh Girl- both of which share a second World War theme. An early favourite from this longlist which could emerge as the eventual winner is Denis Johnson's remarkable political saga, Tree of Smoke.
Expected inclusions such as De Lillo's Falling Manand Moshin Hamid's Booker runner up The Reluctant Fundamentalistalso have an important post 9/11 political relevance.
Interestingly the novel with the most nominations, 18, is A Thousand Splendid Sunsby Afghani Khaled Hosseini, author of the 2003 international bestseller, The Kite Runner.
Among the younger generation of US writers is Travis Holland nominated for his first novel, The Archivist's Story, while debut novels from established short story writers, Nathan Englander for The Ministry of Special Casesand the Pulitzer Prize-winning The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Waoby Junot Diaz should have a say on the short list.
Another first-time novelist, Mischa Berlinski, having had Fieldworkshortlisted for the US National Book Award, now sees it on the Impac longlist.
There will be a great deal of popular support for Joshua Ferris and his all too real version of life as we live it, Then We Came to the End.
A former 2006 Impac finalist, Canadian Frances Itani, author of Deafening, is longlisted with Remembering the Bonesin which the central character, Georgina, had been on her way to England to have birthday tea with the queen, but her car veers off the road.
Lying in a gully, she must rely on her memories. Another Canadian featured on the longlist is Lawrence Hill for The Book of Negroes.
Still as ever with Impac, the greatest pleasure invariably comes from seeing major international fiction in translation emerge through the library nomination system.
The Somalian Nuruddin, author of Maps(1986) and Gifts(1993) is longlisted for Knots, while the Polish writer Pawel Huelle's Castorp, inspired by a sentence from Thomas Mann's masterpiece The Magic Mountain, is another potential finalist. The Norwegian Roy Jacobson has already impressed with his original wartime tale, The Burnt-Out Town of Miracles. It shares the laconic tone of his countryman, 2007 Impac Per Petterson, and is one of those books that compels readers to tell everyone else about it.
The Netherlands has a good Impac track record and the veteran Cees Nooteboom who featured on the inaugural shortlist has been nominated this time for Lost Paradise, a characteristically wry performance. Spanish writer Arturo Perez-Reverte, one-time war correspondent and author of The Flanders Panelalready has an international reputation and The Painter of Battlesis the story of an isolated former war photographer.
This year's judges should have an enjoyable time selecting what could prove an outstanding shortlist. Denis Johnson's Tree of Smoke, a meandering epic possessed of weight and yearning, almost as difficult to read as it is to forget, not only presents the strongest challenge to every other book, it confirms exactly how important fiction continues to be. The shortlist will be announced on April 2nd, 2009.
