Every year, the Carnegie Library of Pittsburgh is one of 150 libraries worldwide invited to nominate three titles for the International IMPAC Dublin Literary Award. We put together a team of librarians who live and breathe fiction and we come up with our own “longlist” of titles.
This year’s winner is The Twin by Gerbrand Baker. Here’s a summation, from the IMPAC website, of the novel:
When Helmer’s twin brother dies in a car accident, he is obliged to return to the small family farm. He resigns himself to taking over his brother’s role and spending the rest of his days ‘with his head under a cow’. After his old, worn-out father has been transferred upstairs, Helmer sets about furnishing the rest of the house according to his own minimal preferences. The Twin is an ode to the platteland, the flat and bleak Dutch countryside with its ditches and its cows and its endless grey skies.
If this particular novel isn’t up your alley, we thought we would supply you with our “longlist” of suggested titles for best novel as suggested by our fiction team:
The Anthologist by Nicholson Baker
Await Your Reply by Dan Chaon
Big Machine by Victor LaValle
Brooklyn by Colin Tóibín
The Book of Night Women by Marlon James.
Censoring an Iranian Love Story by Shahriar Mandanipour
The Children’s Book by A.S. Byatt
Chronic City by Jonathan Lethem
Far North by Marcel Theroux
The Financial Lives of the Poets by Jess Walter
A Gate at the Stairs by Lorrie Moore
Homer and Langley by E. L. Doctorow
Jeff in Venice, Death in Varanasi by Geoff Dyer
The Lacuna: A Novel by Barbara Kingsolver
Let the Great World Spin by Colum McCann
The Man in the Wooden Hat by Jane Gardam
Sag Harbor by Colson Whitehead
A Short History of Women by Kate Walbert
This is Where I Leave You by Jonathan Tropper
Wolf Hall by Hilary Mantel
From this list we were “forced” to select three titles to nominate, as that was the maximum number for each library to submit.
Care to guess which three we picked?
– Don
Eleventh Stack 