We Learn Booker Prize Winner Today

Today's the day we learn the winner of this year's Man Booker Prize, an annual contemporary fiction award given to writers from the British Commonwealth and Ireland. The six finalists for this year's prize are C, by Tom McCarthy; The Finkler Question, by Howard Jacobson; In a Strange Room, by Damon Galgut; The Long Song, by Andrea Levy; Parrot and Olivier in America, by Peter Carey; and Room, by Emma Donoghue. Here's a link to a BBC news site with brief interviews with each of the finalists.

In the betting circles (yes, they actually bet on book awards in England), McCarthy is the odds-on favorite, with a big push in bets in the final days for his experimental tale of time and technology that has drawn comparisons to James Joyce. Historically, the bettors choice isn't the winner, but last year Hilary Mantel's Wolf Hall became the first odds-on favorite to win. If Carey were to win, he would become the first three-time Booker winner. Of the six finalists, the bestseller at our store has been Room, by Irish-Canadian writer Donoghue.

Interestingly, this year's Booker longlist was one of the strongest selling in recent years, but two of the hottest sellers from the longlist did not make the shortlist: The Slap, by Christos Tsiolkas, and The Thousand Autumns of Jacob de Zoet, by David Mitchell.

Who do you think will win? Who do you want to win??