2009 Regional Winners
AFRICA
Best Book: Mandla Langa (South Africa) The Lost Colours of the Chameleon
The Lost Colours of the Chameleon is set on the fictitious island of Bangula in the Indian Ocean - an island populated by an indigenous community that coexists uneasily with Creoles, mainly descendants of ancient Portuguese colonizers. The half-a-million inhabitants live under the twin shadows of an impending cyclone and an outbreak of the blood plague. The novel follows the story of the Colonel Gondo, a patriarch who is the father of the newly reformed nation of Bangula, and the biological father of three sons (one legitimate and two illegitimate). Following their father's death, the Colonel's three sons become embroiled in a bitter succession struggle. Abioseh succeeds the Colonel, but has to contend with the Colonel's love-child, a boy called Zebulon. Zebulon grows up embittered and poverty-stricken, with an aim of avenging his mother, Madu, who died of official neglect. Zebulon, Abioseh's half-brother, is popular among the people for the simple reason that he has made it his life's mission to comfort the bereaved, even strangers.Abioseh also has to contend with the Colonel's third son, Hieronymus Jerome, his childhood friend, who rises in the police ranks and becomes his head of security. However, Hieronymus also has ambitions of power - not so much to wield it conspicuously as to control the wielders of power, an eminence grise - who liaises with an undertaker to topple Abioseh and install Zebulon as leader of the island. This struggle for power is fuelled by the varying and personal motives of the Colonel's three sons, and reveals the fundamental divisions tearing apart the fragile nation.
Best First Book: Uwem Akpan (Nigeria) Say You're One of Them
Nothing interests Maman today, not even Jean, her favorite child … She acts dumb, bewitched, like a goat that the neighborhood children have fed sorghum beer.
These extraordinary stories centre on African conflicts as seen through the eyes of children and describes their resilience and endurance in heartbreaking detail. From child trafficking to inter-religious conflicts, Uwem Akpan reveals in beautiful prose the resilience and endurance of children faced with the harsh consequences of deprivation and terror.
CANADA AND CARIBBEAN
Best Book: Marina Endicott (Canada) Good to a Fault
Absorbed in her own failings, Clara Purdy crashes her car and her life into a sharp left turn, taking the itinerant family of six in the other car along with her. When bruises on the mother, Lorraine, prove to be late-stage cancer, Clara tries to do the right thing, moving the family into her own house and upending her life in the process.
As Lorraine walks the borders of death, Clara expands into life, finding purpose, energy, and unexpected love amidst the hard, unaccustomed work of sharing her life. But the burden is not only Clara's: the
children must cope with the guilt of divided loyalties, and Lorraine must live with her growing, unpayable debt to Clara—and the feeling that Clara has taken her place.
What, exactly, does it mean to be good? When is sacrifice merely selfishness? What do we owe in this life, and what do we deserve? This funny, fiercely intelligent novel looks at life and death through the compassionate lens of a born novelist: being good, being at fault, and finding some balance on the precipice.
Best First Book: Joan Thomas (Canada) Reading by Lightning
Joan Thomas's long-awaited first novel, Reading by Lightning, captures the moods and conflicts of urban England and a God-fearing Canadian prairie town during the tempestuous years leading up to the Second World War.
Lily Piper and her family live in an ephemeral world, due to collapse at any moment when the Lord comes to pluck the faithful from the drought-ravaged prairies. Lily tries to be ready for the coming Day of Judgment, but she's restless and imaginative. When the Lord still hasn't come and puberty hits, Lily is sent to England to live with her father's relatives and goes about the project of reinventing herself. She falls in love with her adopted cousin, George, surrenders her notions of goodness, and waits with the rest of England for the Second World War to start, until circumstances call her home to face a future she thought she had escaped.
Reading by Lightning observes the emergence of a personality in the face of intruding ideologies. With prose that is elegant and wry, devastatingly funny and confident, Joan Thomas tells us something about how we make sense of the future when the future is something we can hardly imagine.
EUROPE AND SOUTH ASIA
Best Book: Jhumpa Lahiri (UK) Unaccustomed Earth
Beginning in America, and spilling back over memories and generations to India, Unaccustomed Earth follows new lives forged in the wake of loss.
These are stories in which deeply sympathetic characters reach pivotal moments in their frayed relationships and are forced to navigate their way in nfamiliar landscapes. In the title story the death of a mother leaves a space neither daughter nor husband knows how to fill. In 'Only Goodness' a younger brother's spiralling alcoholism threatens to destroy his loyal sister's family. And in a trio of linked stories we follow the lives of a girl and boy who, one memorable winter, share a house in suburban Massachusetts. They travel from innocence to experience on separate, sometimes painful paths, until they are brought together years later in a chance meeting in Rome.
With moving compassion Lahiri traces a series of transformations: weariness into hope, secrets into sacrifices, and grief into unforeseen love. Eight luminous stories - longer and richer than any she has yet written – explore the heart of family life and the immigrant experience, taking us from America to Europe, India and Thailand. Infused with eloquent warmth and lyrical simplicity, Unaccustomed Earth confirms Jhumpa Lahiri's status as a storyteller of unrivalled empathy.
Best First Book: Mohammed Hanif (Pakistan) A Case of Exploding Mangoes
Why did a Hercules C130, the world's sturdiest plane, carrying Pakistan's military dictator General Zia ul Haq, go down on 17 August, 1988?
Mohammed Hanif's debut novel takes one of the subcontinent's enduring mysteries and spins a tale as rich and colourful as a beggar's dream.
Mohammed Hanif was born in Okara, Pakistan. He flew in the Pakistan Air Force before pursuing a career in journalism. Hanif now lives in London and is the head of the BBC's Urdu Service. A Case of Exploding Mangoes won the Guardian First Book Award 2008 and was longlisted for the Man Booker Award 2008.
SOUTH EAST ASIA AND SOUTH PACIFIC
Best Book: Christos Tsiolkas (Australia) The Slap
At a suburban barbecue, a man slaps a child who is not his own.
This event has a shocking ricochet effect on a group of people, mostly friends, who are directly or indirectly influenced by the event.
In this remarkable novel, Christos Tsiolkas turns his unflinching and all-seeing eye onto that which connects us all: the modern family and domestic life in the twenty-first century. The Slap is told from the points of view of eight people who were present at the barbecue. The slap and its consequences force them all to question their own families and the way they live, their expectations, beliefs and desires.
What unfolds is a powerful, haunting novel about love, sex and marriage, parenting and children, and the fury and intensity - all the passions and conflicting beliefs - that family can arouse. In its clear-eyed and forensic dissection of the ever-growing middle class and its aspirations and fears, The Slap is also a poignant, provocative novel about the nature of loyalty and happiness, compromise and truth.
Best First Book: Mo Zhi Hong (New Zealand) The Year of the Shanghai Shark
Hai Long is a teenager living in the Chinese city of Dalian. It's the year of the SARS epidemic in China. This is a modern China that's eye-catchingly contemporary. Hai Long and his mates drink Coca-Cola and eat American fast food. They watch American NBA basketball on television and argue whether Michael Jordan is the greatest player ever. They go to English language lessons and hilariously mock Karl, their hopelessly naïve Canadian teacher, who drinks too much beer and is just dying to get away to Thai beaches to hang out with German babes.
This is also the year in which Hai Long leaves school to learn the unlikely trade of his uncle. 'Uncle' has many books, but he's actually a highly successful professional pick-pocket who specialises in robbing dazed foreigners – Koreans and Japanese as well as Europeans – and makes special trips to Beijing for the purpose. As we meet a series of colourful characters in Hai Long's life and hang out with him and his mates, we also watch the teenager being trained in the ways of the pick-pocket.
This is a sophisticated story of China's new generation severing ties with their cultural past, and rich with a fascinating array of colourful characters who frequent their inner-city apartment block – from Gambler Dang, a high stakes Ma Jiang player, to Fish, a peasant from the countryside and an unlikely friend, and finally Uncle, whose shadowy occupation exerts an irresistible pull on Hai Long's life . . .
An accessible yet deceptively clever novel from an electric new voice.
