Colm Toibin

The sale of audiobooks has skyrocketed in recent years. In 2012, total industry sales in the book business fell just under 1 percent over all, but those of downloadable audiobooks rose by more than 20 percent. That year, 13,255 titles came out as audiobooks, compared with 4,602 in 2009. Publishers seem to be paying more attention to their production. When Simon and Schuster published Colm Toibin’s “Testament of Mary” last autumn, the narrator was Meryl Streep.

The shortlist for the Man Booker Prize for Fiction, the most prestigious literary award in Britain, was announced on Tuesday morning. The six finalists are: "We Need New Names," by NoViolet Bulawayo (Little, Brown/Chatto); "The Luminaries," by Eleanor Catton (Little, Brown/Granta); "Harvest," by Jim Crace (Nan A. Talese/Picador); "The Lowland," by Jhumpa Lahiri (Knopf/Bloomsbury); "A Tale for the Time Being," by Ruth Ozeki (Viking/Canongate); "The Testament of Mary," by Colm Toibin (Scribner/Penguin)

 

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