On July 26, my second novel,
His Bloody Project, was slumbering in comfortable obscurity somewhere around the 300,000-mark on the Amazon U.K. charts. By close of play the following day, it had reached 32. Seven weeks later — as I write this article — it’s at number 9. That’s a very giddy height for any novel, never mind one set in a tiny crofting community in the Scottish Highlands in the 1860s.
So what brought about this sudden change in fortunes? Quite simply, the good opinion of the world’s most powerful book group: the five judges of the
Man Booker Prize.
Anyone in the English-speaking world with even the most passing interest in things literary has heard of the Man Booker Prize. Since 1969, it’s been the most prestigious literary prize in Britain and the Commonwealth...