Room for praise

Jamie Byng, the publisher at Scotland's Canongate, was shocked by the omission of another Australian from the longlist, as he wrote on the Man Booker website. After praising the chosen novels by Salman Rushdie, Sebastian Barry, Steve Toltz and "bits of" Joseph O'Neill's Netherland, he says: "But I cannot respect a judging committee that decides to pick a book like Child 44 [by Tom Rob Smith], a fairly well-written and well-paced thriller ... over novels as exceptional as Helen Garner's The Spare Room or Ross Raisin's God's Own Country." After declaring his bias as Garner's British publisher, Byng adds, "this novel has been as well-reviewed as any book Canongate has ever published ... I received remarkable and heartfelt responses from a whole array of other novelists about the book pre-publication including Peter Carey ('The... [read full story]