Man Booker Semifinalists Include Coetzee, Cromwell, Cheeta The Chimp

“Literary heavyweights AS Byatt and JM Coetzee were today named on this year’s longlist for the Booker prize – which also features a first-time writer purporting to be Tarzan’s chimpanzee.” Other candidates include “Wolf Hall, Hilary Mantel’s gripping account of Henry VIII’s Tudor court told through his chief minister, Thomas Cromwell”; “Adam Foulds’ The Quickening Maze, set in a private asylum used by the Victorian poet John Clare”; and Colm Tóibín’s Brooklyn.