The Man Booker Prize 2016, the winner is announced!

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:

Deborah Levy, Hot milk 

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.

Graeme Macrae Burnet, His bloody project

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.

David Szalay, All that man is

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.

Madeleine Thien, Do not say we have nothing

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.

All the books are available to borrow or reserve from Torfaen Libraries. 

Catalogue / Catalog

Mae’r llyfrau i gyd ar gael i’w benthyg neu i’w neilltuo gan Lyfrgelloedd Torfaen.