The Booker longlist

New releases

The longlist for the 2007 Man Booker Prize has confounded the expectations of most analysts. Ian McEwan (On Chesil Beach) is the only genuinely big name in a list that has widely been described as a giant-killer: the likes of Doris Lessing, Michael Ondaatje, J M Coetzee and Graham Swift "" all of whom had novels that were eligible for this year's prize "" have been left out, and the second-most high-profile entry is probably Mohsin Hamid's

The Reluctant Fundamentalist. Two Indian-origin novelists are on the list:

GIFTED
Nikita Lalwani
Penguin Books
288 pages
Rs 395

This is a breezy, very readable novel about a young girl's coming of age. Rumi Vasi is ten years, two months, thirteen days, two hours, forty-two minutes and six seconds old. The probability of her walking home from school with John Kemble is 0.2142, a probability severely reduced by the lacy frock and thick woollen tights she is forced to wear by her father.

As you might have figured by now, numbers have filled Rumi's world since she first learned to count. It was on a trip to India at the age of eight that her mathematical powers acquired their almost supernatural significance.

When she returned home to Cardiff, her destiny was sealed: she was now the town's "maths prodigy". But Rumi is growing up and numbers no longer occupy her every waking moment: she abandons her homework to seek out friendship and replaces equations with stories from Malory Towers.

Nikita Lalwani's debut captures brilliantly the experience of growing up in an emotional and comic hinterland where history, arithmetic and cumin seeds all play a part.

ANIMAL'S PEOPLE
Indra Sinha
Simon & Schuster
384 pages

"I used to be human once. So I'm told. I don't remember it myself, but people who knew me when I was small say I walked on two feet just like a human being..."

Ever since he can remember, Animal has gone on all fours, the catastrophic result of what happened on That Night when, thanks to an American chemical company, the Apocalypse visited his slum. Now not quite twenty, he leads a hand-to-mouth existence with his dog Jara and a crazy old nun called Ma Franci, and spends his nights fantasising about Nisha, the daughter of a local musician, and wondering what it must be like to get laid.

When a young American doctor, Elli Barber, comes to town to open a free clinic for the still suffering townsfolk "" only to find herself struggling to convince them that she isn't there to do the dirty work of the "Kampani" "" Animal plunges into a web of intrigues, scams and plots with the unabashed aim of turning events to his own advantage.