Havoc and The Master

The IMPAC book prize was most recently contested by an Irish writer in 2003 when the sadly departed John McGahern was nominated for That They May Face the Rising Sun.

Those looking for more from McGahern may be interested in one of his final essays on the role of religion in his life, which is available on the Guardian website. Incidentally, also to be found there, from the pages of the Observer, is Zugzwang, which sees Irish novelist Ronan Bennett go Dickens-like with a weekly serialised thriller set in Russia. In a clumsy linking of the two, Bennett is one of the ten recently announced finalists on the 2006 IMPAC shortlist for his Booker longlisted novel Havoc, in the Third Year. He is joined there by fellow Irishman Colm Toibín for The Master. Other notable inclusions on the list are Nadeem Aslam's Maps for Lost Lovers. and Jonathan Coe's sequel to The Rotters Club, The Closed Circle. The IMPAC prize, sponsored by the titular medical information systems company, will be awarded in Dublin on 14 July. It carries the biggest prize of them all – €100,000 – and the most unpredictable selection criteria. Book Notes is not going to start guessing now, looking at the variety of books that has already won the prize, including Alistair McLeod's No Great Mischief and Andrew Miller's Ingenious Pain.

Turkish delight
The eventual winner the year John McGahern was nominated for the IMPAC prize, was Turkish author Orhan Pamuk's My Name is Red. Village readers will be familiar with Pamuk's recent troubles in his homeland where he has spent the last year under threat of imprisonment after being charged with the offence of insulting Turkishness. Pamuk is well known internationally, but he is even bigger news at home, where his more literary efforts like Snow and My Name is Red are countered by a series of more accessible, populist thrillers. After months of buck-passing, both the Turkish government and judiciary decided that there was no case to be answered, and Pamuk is free to both discuss the case and resume his next novel, The Museum of Innocence. He now wrestles with the dichotomy of his current position; at home he is the poster-boy for the campaign for Turkey to gain admittance to the EU, while his treatment by his government is allowing Europeans to argue why Turkey should be excluded.

The secret river
The Commonwealth Writers' Prize and a £10,000 prize were awarded to Australian Kate Grenville last week in Melbourne to coincide with the Commonwealth Games. This is the equivalent of the Booker Prize without the UK, and seems to involve a lot of recognition for Peter Carey, Rohinton Minstry and JM Coetzee. Grenville's book, The Secret River is a historical relation of the fights and competing claims to land rights between settlers and Aborigines.

iRead
Book Notes has been eagerly following developments in the digitisation of the book world, as the major media players try to envision and corner the market in our reading future. A brief look at the market saturation of the iPod shows how much is at stake. Just look at how Apple's de rigueur music players are for sale here in phone shops, rather than more fitting outlets like PC or music stores. Odds are that those making decisions in these stores opted to not support the iPod – to their eternal regret. Similar developments are afoot in the world of e-reading as the companies involved try to see how strong each other are. Both Amazon and Barnes & Noble, the leading US book store, have decided not to support Sony's Reader. When we first reported on the electronic book last year it was called the libre and had just been launched in Asia. Now the iPod equivalent for words is about to hit the shops in Europe and America. If it takes off – and it is a huge risk – it may change how we read, swap and purchase books. It will retail at between $300 and $400 and will be available through Borders, the second largest US book seller (and the most recent entrant into the Irish book market), the company currently displaying the cojones for this great leap forward.