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Four Penguin Canada titles on the 2009 Man Booker Prize longlist

Penguin Group (Canada) represents three of the thirteen titles longlisted for the 2009 Man Booker Prize: Ed O'Loughlin's Not Untrue and Not Unkind (9781844881857 / Penguin Ireland), Sarah Hall's How to Paint a Dead Man (9780571224890 / Faber & Faber), and Simon Mawer's The Glass Room (9781408700778 / Little, Brown).

Penguin Canada Executive Editor Nicole Winstanley has just acquired Canadian rights to James Scudamore's Heliopolis, also longlisted for the 2009 Man Booker Prize. Says Winstanley, "We're very proud to have Heliopolis on the Penguin Group (Canada) list and are delighted with the Man Booker Prize jury's recognition of both the book and its remarkable author."

Scudamore's first novel, The Amnesia Clinic, was hailed by fellow Booker prize nominee Hilary Mantel as "a wonderful debut-witty, polished, fluent, and effortlessly entertaining." It was shortlisted for the Costa First Novel Prize, the Commonwealth Writers' Prize, the Dylan Thomas Prize, and the Glen Dimplex Award, and went on to win the Somerset Maugham Prize.

His second work, Heliopolis, was declared "a triumph" by New Statesman and "an unsettling and magically compelling read" by The Daily Mail. It centres on Ludo, who as a child was plucked out of the shantytown where he was born and transported to a world of languid, cosseted luxury. Now twenty-seven, he works high above the sprawling metropolis of Sao Paulo for a vacuous communications company. But this is not his world, and this is not a simple rags-to-riches story: Ludo's destiny moves him around like a chess piece, showing him extremities of opulent excess and abject poverty, taking him to the brink of madness and brutality.

The Man Booker Prize, the leading literary award in the English-speaking world, is worth £50,000 and is awarded to the author of the best full-length novel in the opinion of the judges, and usually guarantees major spikes in sales for the work. A total of 132 books, 11 of which were called in by the judges, were considered for the Man Booker Dozen longlist of 13 books. The 2009 shortlist will be announced on September 8 at a press conference at Man Group's London headquarters, with the winner revealed on October 6th in a ceremony at London's Guildhall. Visit the Man Booker Prize website for more details and the full longlist.

Find out more at www.penguin.ca

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