U.S. novelist Paul Beatty has won the Man Booker Prize for his novel ‘The Sellout‘!
The first american to win the prize, Beatty’s 4th novel is a biting satire about a young man’s isolated upbringing and the race trial that sends him to the Supreme Court.
Chair of the judges Amanda Foreman said the novel “plunges into the heart of contemporary American society, with an absolutely savage wit, of the kind I haven’t seen since Swift or Twain; [it] both manages to slay every social taboo and politically correct nuance, every sacred cow; and while making us laugh also makes us wince, it is both funny and painful at the same time, and it is really a novel for our times.” [source: The Bookseller]
Born in the ‘agrarian ghetto’ of Dickens – on the southern outskirts of Los Angeles – the narrator of The Sellout is raised by his single father, a controversial sociologist, and spends his childhood as the subject in racially charged psychological studies. Led to believe that his father’s pioneering work will result in a memoir that will solve his family’s financial woes, he is shocked to discover, after his father is killed in a police shoot-out, that there never was a memoir. In fact, all that’s left is the bill for a drive-through funeral. Fuelled by this deceit and the general disrepair of his hometown, the narrator sets out to right another wrong: his hometown Dickens has literally been removed from the map to save California from further embarrassment. Enlisting the help of the town’s most famous resident – Hominy Jenkins – he initiates the most outrageous action conceivable: reinstating slavery and segregating the local high school. What follows is a remarkable journey that challenges the sacred tenets of the United States Constitution, urban life, the civil rights movement and the holy grail of racial equality – the black Chinese restaurant.
The Sellout is available to order in store and online. Most stores will have it in stock in November.
