Keeping Up with the Jones's
Terry Jones's Who Murdered Chaucer? and War on the War on Terror. Khaled Hosseini's The Kite Runner and the Man Booker Prize winner Ismail Kadare
One of the apparently fantastic things about fame and success is that it allows you do whatever your A-list heart desires. Not happy just being a member of Monty Python, history's most popular comedy troupe? Tired of being the least famous and least successful of your old friends? Do as Terry Jones did and write about whatever occupies your mind. All the Pythons were in New York recently for the premier of the Holy Grail stage adaptation Spamalot and Jones seized the opportunity to promote his new work. Ex-colleague Michael Palin found travel writing lucrative with books like Sahara and Pole to Pole – now Jones has followed suit, albeit not with such crowd pleasing topics. We say topics for Jones is publishing not one book but two. Whimsy seems to be all that links his two books; Who Murdered Chaucer? and Terry Jones's War on the War on Terror. Jones has been drawing tenuous links while promoting the two but the dual publication sounds like a 'What I Thought on my Summer Holidays' school essay to us.
Mr Popular
Children's fiction has been in the news more than usual recently despite Philip Pullman of the Northern Lights series complaining that his books were only discussed in terms of their (admittedly spectacular) sales figures. He has a point, one we could sympathise with more genuinely if he wasn't so successful. A recently commissioned Waterstones poll of book sales since 1998 showed utter dominance by children's authors; JK Rowling was first, Jacqueline Wilson second with Pullman fifth. All conquering Dan Brown was relegated to 7th place. Even Enid Blyton, once queen of the genre and thought by us to have been left behind in the last century, was 12th biggest selling author. The biggest surprise of all was the appearance in third place of Roger Hargreaves, author of the Mr Men series, a feat which makes this writer Mr Jealous indeed.
Runner Returns to Kabul
Khaled Hosseini's The Kite Runner is fast becoming the ultimate book club selection; just the right level of education, social relevancy and at its heart a poignant tale of redemption that reads like a well-paced memoir.
The book has spread through word of mouth – initially limited to 50,000 copies, it has been reprinted 17 times and will soon top sales of two million worldwide. Hosseini has come far in the two years since the publication of his book and his first book reading / signing which was attended by a solitary punter. Hosseini has been at pains to point out that he derived no inspiration from his own life, so sure are his readers that the book's events actually happened. The son of an Afghani diplomat, he was posted with his family to Paris in 1976 and stayed there throughout the upheaval of the 1970s. Indeed, the family never returned to their homeland and were granted asylum in the US in 1980. They moved to San Diego where Hosseini completed a medical doctorate, writing his debut after his internship.
With the book finished and ready for publication, Hosseini did return to Kabul, just as Amir does in his quest to rescue his boyhood friend Hassan in The Kite Runner. Hosseini's account of the real trip to Afghanistan will have a surreal quality for fans of the novel as the author relives his fictional character's memories and journey. It is posted on his own website, www.khaledhosseini.com and will provide salve for the unsated fans of the book that have made it an international bestseller for the last year.
World Wide Winner
The winner of the International Man Booker Prize was announced last week and will be presented at a ceremony in Edinburgh on 27 June. This was the inaugural awarding of the prize, set up last year to widen the eligibility from that of the main Man Booker Prize which only considers books from the Commonwealth. It is to be awarded every second year in recognition of a body of work rather than an individual book. Professor John Carey, chair of this year's judges, commented that "this new prize will reward high international achievement, but unlike other global prizes, it will target fiction in English, or translated into English, and so will celebrate English-language fiction as a major cultural force."
The inaugural winner is to be Ismail Kadare, a leading figure in Albanian fiction who has been writing since the 1960s. Kadare beat out far more recognisable names like John Updike, Gabriel Garcia Marquez and Muriel Spark who were also shortlisted for the £60,000 prize. Some of Kadare's work has been banned in Albania from where he was smuggled to Paris in the 1990s to avoid the ruling regime who viewed him as subversive. His is a surprising choice, not for the quality of the little-known Kadare's work but because the judges wanted to choose "the best writer in the world" and purposefully ignored the opportunity to establish the brand of the Prize by choosing one of the literary giants on the shortlist. No doubt the sponsors are thrilled.