And the winner is The Sellout, by Paul Beatty
Cyhoeddi enillydd Gwobr Man
Booker 2016!
A’r enillydd yw The
Sellout, gan Paul Beatty
Launched in 1969, the Man Booker Prize (originally the Booker Prize) aims to promote the finest fiction by rewarding the best novel of the year (in the opinion of the judges), written in English and published in the UK.
Mae Gwobr Man Booker (Gwobr Booker yn wreiddiol), a
lansiwyd yn 1969, yn anelu at hybu’r ffuglen orau trwy wobrwyo nofel orau’r
flwyddyn (ym marn y beirniaid) yn Saesneg ac wedi ei chyhoeddi yn y DU.
Beatty is the first US author to win the Man
Booker Prize. His novel is a racial satire telling the story of a young black
man who tries to reinstate slavery and racial segregation in a suburb of Los
Angeles.
Beatty yw’r awdur cyntaf
o UDA i ennill Gwobr Man Booker. Nofel ddychanol am hil yw’r llyfr sy’n adrodd
hanes dyn du ifanc sy’n ceisio ail-gyflwyno caethwasiaeth a gwahanu hiliol yn
un o faestrefi Los Angeles.
Paul Beatty, The sellout
Born in the 'agrarian ghetto' of Dickens - on the southern outskirts of
Los Angeles - the narrator of The Sellout is raised by a single father, a
controversial sociologist, and spends his childhood as the subject in racially
charged psychological studies. Led to believe his father's pioneering work will
result in a memoir that will solve his family's financial woes, he is shocked
to discover, when his father is killed in a police shoot-out, that there never
was a memoir. All that's left is a bill for a drive-through funeral. Fuelled by
this deceit and the general disrepair of his hometown, the narrator sets out to
right another wrong: Dickens has literally been removed from the map to save California
from embarrassment.
Other titles on this year’s shortlist were:
Teitlau eraill ar y
rhestr fer eleni oedd:
Two women arrive in a Spanish village, a dreamlike place caught between
the desert and the ocean, seeking medical advice and salvation. One suffers
from a mysterious illness: spontaneous paralysis confines her to a wheelchair.
The other, her daughter Sofia, has spent years playing the reluctant detective,
struggling to understand her mother's illness. Surrounded by the oppressive
desert heat and the mesmerising figures who move through it, Sofia waits while
her mother undergoes the strange programme of treatments invented by Dr Gomez.
Searching for a cure to a defiant and quite possibly imagined disease, ever
more entangled in the seductive, mercurial games of those around her, Sofia
finally comes to confront and reconcile the disparate fragments of her identity.
A story ingeniously recounted through Roderick Macrae's memoir, trial
transcripts, and newspaper reports, this book is a riveting literary thriller
that will appeal to fans of Hannah Kent's 'Burial Rites'.
Ottessa Moshfegh, Eileen
The Christmas season offers little cheer for Eileen Dunlop, an
unassuming yet disturbed young woman trapped between her role as her alcoholic
father's carer in his squalid home and her day job as a secretary at the boys'
prison, filled with its own daily horrors. Consumed by resentment and
self-loathing, Eileen tempers her dreary days with perverse fantasies and
dreams of escaping to the big city. In the meantime, she fills her nights and
weekends with shoplifting, stalking a handsome prison guard named Randy, and
cleaning up her increasingly deranged father's messes. When the beautiful,
charismatic Rebecca Saint John arrives on the scene as the new counsellor at
the prison, Eileen is enchanted and unable to resist what appears to be a
miraculously budding friendship.
There are nine men in this book, and they think they have unique
stories. But really, aren't they all the same man? Each of them is searching,
reaching, not quite grasping their situations. None of them is at home. They
are alone in the edge-lands of Europe, and the stakes are bewilderingly high.
And so these nine lives form an ingenious novel, in which David Szalay expertly
plots a dark predicament for the 21st century man. It's not a joke. Life is not
a joke.
In Canada in 1991, ten year old Marie and her mother invite a guest into
their home. She is Ai-Ming, a young woman from China who has fled following the
aftermath of the Tiananmen Square incident. As her relationship with Marie
deepens she tells the story of her family in revolutionary China.