'Booker of Bookers'

In celebration of their twenty-first anniversary a few years back, the organisers of the Booker prize decided to nominate the 'Booker of Bookers', awarding the 'best winner' award to Salman Rushdie's Midnight's Children. How Banville's The Sea would have fared we know not but taking their lead from the Booker, The Orange Prize for Fiction decided to mark their tenth anniversary by judging the best of the books that have won since 1995. The Orange Prize is awarded to the best book of the year written in English by a woman and has countered its detractors accusations of tokenism and taunts of having a feminist agenda by saluting great fiction like Carol Shields' Larry's Party, Suzanne Berne's A Crime in the Neighbourhood and Valerie Martin's Property. The nod went to the 2004 winner, Andrea Levy's Small Island, the universally popular comic tale of a Jamaican immigrant family living in '50s London. Levy was modest and unassuming in acceptance, shying away from the perceived mysteries of writing and vainglorious talk of art by comparing her writing to TV soap operas.

The award was set up in 1996 because the women behind it felt they were being ignored or underrepresented by other prizes. Perhaps things are less difficult a decade later as we note that award founder Kate Mosse has spent most of the summer at the top of the hardback book charts with her archaeological thriller Labyrinth, set in medieval and modern France. One of the favourites for this year's prize (she lost to We Need to Talk about Kevin) and longlisted for the Man Booker, Marina Lewycka's A Short History of Tractors in Ukranian, was selected by Saga as the best comic book of the year at a recent ceremony. The ongoing success of the book will ease the difficulty it caused to Waterstones' UK staff who originally filed the book in their agriculture section.

Figures released this week show that 13 per cent of books sold last year were books for children but are they as good as they used to be? The classic will embark on a collision course with the new this winter when Narnia meets Potter at the cinema.

Adults dragging their kids on a search for childhood memories, teenagers equally intent on remembering a book barely filed on their shelves. The first adaptation of CS Lewis' collection will be its most popular episode, The Lion, The witch and The Wardrobe. Filmed in New Zealand with a large budget, its success is guaranteed, no matter how many go to see Harry Potter and The Goblet of Fire. Producers Disney are no doubt delighted at the prospect of releasing a new movie each year until 2011 but readers of the Narnia stories will wonder if the enterprise will be a sure shot of Harry Potter proportions, or the Lord of the Rings trilogy. Narnian characters are not common to all books, the tone changes sharply and the common hero is an animatronic lion, Aslan. Still, the makers have lessened the latter difficulty by confirming what Irish children knew all along – Aslan was indeed Irish, albeit Northern Irish, as shown by the casting of Liam Neeson as his voice. Proving all things come in threes, Renee Zellwegger has been chosen to play Beatrix Potter in a biography of her life. Attention for the movie has come too late for High Yewdale Farm, the inspirational setting for Jemima Puddleduck among other books. The land is to be divided up and sold as its current owner retires. Efforts to have it rescued or listed, which were supported by Prince Charles, were abandoned last week.

Authors of the two most successful literary fiction novels of 2004 are back in the news this week. David Mitchell, honorary Corkman and author of the UK Book of the Year with Cloud Atlas has just signed a deal to publish his fourth novel Black Swan Green. Like many young male British writers he has been able to avoid the lure of the modern period piece and will publish the eagerly anticipated (not least here) book in early 2006. It is to be set in a small English village in 1982, a far cry from cure Atlas which spanned centuries and genres within a uniquely layered structure. Still, Michell's second novel Number 9 Dream was a smaller novel constrained by fewer characters and one setting but still managed to explore and experiment with typical Mitchell zest. The other work from 2004 grabbing attention is Philip Roth's A Plot Against America. Imagining a US in the 1940s where Jews were persecuted and Lindbergh was President, much was made of the parallels to modern America as the nation became polarised by last year's Presidential election. Fans of The Human Stain and American Pastoral will be well advised to get a copy on this week's paperback release.