Listed below, a very little bit about each book in this year's competition, in order of the original list.
Telex from Cuba by Rachel Kushner (No. 2 Seed, Upper Bracket, 7/2 odds)
Kushner's first novel doesn't read like your usual debut. Using family stories, extensive archival research, and all the tools of the novelist's imagination, she creates a portrait in many voices of a small society at a crucial moment in time. (Amazon)
Babylon Rolling by Amanda Boyden (No. 6 Seed, Lower Bracket, 20/1 odds)
It is the summer of 2004, and Orchid Street is changing. Newcomers Ariel May and her husband, Ed, relocated from Minnesota, are trying to make sense of the Southern City [New Orleans]. (Amazon)
Beautiful Children by Charles Bock (No. 7 Seed, Lower Bracket, 30/1 odds)
Las Vegas is the expression, in glitter and concrete, of America's brittle and mutating id. This is not the argument of Charles Bock's exceptional Beautiful Children, so much as the starting point from which he explores the survival strategies--usually doomed--of the citizen-mutants themselves. (Washington Post)
Dear American Airlines by Jonathan Miles (No. 4 Seed, Lower Bracket, 8/3 odds)
This crisp yowl of a first novel from Miles, who covers books for Men's Journal and cocktails for the New York Times, finds despairing yet effusive litterateur Benjamin Ford midair in midlife crisis. (Publishers Weekly)
Lush Life by Richard Price (No. 3 Seed, Lower Bracket, 9/1 odds)
No one has a better ear and eye for the American city that Richard Price, and in Lush Life, his first novel in five years, he leaves the fictional environs of Dempsy, New Jersey...for a few crowded blocks of Manhattan's Lower East Side. (Amazon)
The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo by Stieg Larsson (No. 5 Seed, Lower Bracket, 16/1 odds)
Cases rarely come much colder than the decades-old disappearance of teen heiress Harriet Vanger from her family's remote island retreat north of Stockholm...(Publishers Weekly)
So Brave, Young and Handsome by Leif Enger (No. 6 Seed, Upper Bracket, 35/1 odds)
A gritty western couched in the easy storytelling style of a folk ballad (think 3:10 to Yuma as sung by the Kingston Trio)...(Amazon)
Harry, Revised by Mark Sarvas (No. 5 Seed, Upper Bracket, 11/1 odds)
This debut novel from popular literary blogger Sarvas focuses on the midlife crisis of recently widowed Harry Rent. (Publishers Weekly)
Home by Marilynne Robinson (No. 2 Seed, Lower Bracket, 5/1 odds)
"What does it mean to come home?" In one way or another, every character in Home is searching for that answer...(Amazon)
Netherland by Joseph O'Neill (No. 3 Seed, Upper Bracket, 7/2 odds)
O'Neill offers an outsider's view of New York bursting with wisdom, authenticity and a sobering jolt of realism. (Publishers Weekly)
A Mercy by Toni Morrison (No. 1 Seed, Lower Bracket, 3/2 odds)
Toni Morrison's new novel makes a spellbinding companion to Beloved, her 1987 tour de force that transformed our understanding of slavery and won the Pulitzer Prize. (Washington Post)
The Dart League King by Keith Lee Morris (No. 4 Seed, Upper Bracket, 11/1 odds)
In this absorbing and intelligeng novel, Morris follows five characters throught a handful of hours culminating in a dart contest on a Thursday night in Garnet Lake, Idaho. (Publishers Weekly)
Unaccustomed Earth by Jhumpa Lahiri (No. 8 Seed, Lower Bracket, 20/1 odds)
The gulf that separates expatriate Bengali parents from their American-raised children--and that separates the children from India--remains Lahiri's subject for this follow-up to Interpreter of Maladies and The Namesake. (Publishers Weekly)
The Northern Clemency by Philip Hensher (No. 7 Seed, Upper Bracket, 5/1 odds)
The Northern Clemency begins at the perimeter of a late-summer party, amidst a din of neighbors gossiping one moment and navigating awkward silences the next. But once you encounter the Glover family--in particular, their languidly handsome teenage son Daniel--there's no turning back. (Amazon)
2666 by Roberto Bolaño (No. 1 Seed, Upper Bracket, 3/1 odds)
It was one thing to read Roberto Bolaño's novel The Savage Detectives last year...It was still another to read it and know, from advance reports of Spanish readers, that Bolaño's true masterpiece was still to come. (Amazon)
White Tiger by Aravind Adiga (No. 8 Seed, Upper Bracket, 11/2 odds)
In this darkly comic début novel set in India, Balram, a chauffeur, murders his employer, justifying his crime as the act of a "social entrepreneur." (Publishers Weekly)
