Man Booker Prize 2011 Longlist announced.

The longlist for the 2011 Man Booker Prize for Fiction was announced yesterday, Tuesday 26 July. They are:

• Julian Barnes The Sense of an Ending
• Sebastian Barry On Canaan's Side
• Carol Birch Jamrach's Menagerie
• Patrick deWitt The Sisters Brothers 
• Esi Edugyan Half Blood Blues
• Yvvette Edwards A Cupboard Full of Coats
• Alan Hollinghurst The Stranger's Child
• Stephen Kelman Pigeon English
• Patrick McGuinness The Last Hundred Days
• A.D. Miller Snowdrops
• Alison Pick Far to Go
• Jane Rogers The Testament of Jessie Lamb
• D.J. Taylor Derby Day

You know the drill - click on the individual titles to check availability, or if you're feeling particularly indolent, you can click here to bring up the complete list (radical new departure this - see how much we value your time!)

As usual, what we don't have, we'll get as soon as we can and update this list accordingly.

The shortlist of six authors will be announced on Tuesday 6 September and the winner will be announced on Tuesday 18 October at a dinner at London's Guildhall and will be broadcast on the BBC.

Win 2 free tickets to our wonderful Wine Tasting Evening!

On Friday 29th July, Cardiff Central Library is hosting a Wine Tasting Evening - doors open at 7, corks pop shortly thereafter.

Tickets for this event are retailing at the very reasonable price of £10.00, but you Dear Readers, you have the opportunity to win 2 of these much sought-after items!

"How, oh how?" I hear you cry.  Well, I'll tell you.

All you have to do is answer these six easy questions and email your answers to centrallibrary@cardiff.gov.uk

And to make life even easier for you, I'm allowed to tell you that all answers can be found via our e-Reference resources here.


Right, here we go -

1. What is the difference between Syrah and Shiraz?
2. What is terroir?
3. Who painted "Bacchus and Drinker"?
4. In which country would you find Rioja?
5. The Master of Wine, Mrs.N. L. Lander is better known as who?
6. What is phylloxera?

Judges decisions are final (unless you're bigger than us), and will NOT be influenced by envelopes of unmarked, small denomination notes with non-sequential numbers left in a phonebox and/or supermarket car-park.

All correct entries will be placed in The Library Hat and a winner drawn on 22nd July.

Good luck.

I'm finding this quite exciting!  Must get out more.

Cardiff Central Library Author Event - Kris Taylor.

When she was four years old in 1917, Ruth’s German mother abandoned her and her brother in a children’s home in Dresden. When her Jewish father came there to reclaim his children two years later, Ruth was influenced by the matron to reject him. She never saw him again.

At fourteen she left the children’s home to become a Haustochter, and spent the next eleven years in various domestic posts. Despised as a half Jew, she escaped from Nazi Germany just eight weeks before the beginning of WWII, to become a refugee in England.

This book, written by her daughter, chronicles Ruth’s life in Germany, England and Wales. Struggling against poverty all her life, her fortune was dramatically changed by a very large inheritance from a totally unexpected source when she was eighty two.

Throughout her life she regretted her rejection of her father, and expressed a desire to know what had become of him. This led to her daughter’s ten year search, a DNA test, and an astonishing discovery.

Join Kris at the author event at the Central Library this Wednesday.