Julian Barnes Takes the Man Booker Prize

The fourth time is, apparently, the charm. With The Sense of an Ending, Julian Barnes wins the 2011 Man Booker Prize. The multifaceted writer has been shortlisted three times before, for three wildly different novels -- first in 1984 for his innovative Flaubert's Parrot; fourteen years later for  England, England; and then again for Arthur and George in 2005. In The Sense of an Ending, a man in late middle age finds that a secret from his childhood threatens to overturn the careful architecture of his comfortable life.

 

The other shortlisted titles were The Sisters Brothers by Patrick deWitt, Jamrach's Menagerie by Carol Birch, Half Blood Blues by Esi Edugya, Pigeon English by Stephen Kelman, and Snowdrops by A. D. Miller.

May 23: Girolamo Savonarola was hanged on this day in 1498 and then incinerated in the same piazza in which the citizens of Florence had earlier attended more than one "bonfire of the vanities." George Eliot's 1863 novel Romola,

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