Alert! Not that it has anything to do with SA Lit, but Kathryn Stockett’s Jackson, Mississippi-set novel, The Help, has won Exclusive Books’ 2009 Boeke Prize.
The prize is meant to be a kind of local Man Booker, celebrating the “top English fiction books of the preceeding [sic] year. They are unputdownable reads that simply suck you into their world, and stay with you long after the last pages are read”. To be sure, the prize itself is somewhat smaller than the Booker, being a certificate accompanied by zero rands (or have EB ponied up some cash this year?) and a mild spike in SA sales – rather than a certificate accompanied by £50 000 and a worldwide tsunami of sales – but let that not deter you from concurring with the press release that claims the Boeke “has truly become a highly coveted accolade”.
Earlier this month, Margaret von Klemperer got to grips with the Boeke shortlist:
After a couple of years when the choice of Boeke Prize finalists was a bit substandard, this year’s pile of six bestsellers has been a treat.
They arrived on my desk with instructions to find the one which stands out as “the most superb, unputdownable book of the year”, which I also have to believe is a work of “literary art”.
Not sure quite what that means, but I certainly found plenty to enjoy, and all these six books, which the country’s biggest bookselling chain wants to promote as top-notch reads, have something to offer.
And here’s the winning novel’s blurb:
Jackson, Mississippi, 1962. Black maids raise white children, but aren’t trusted not to steal the silver. Some lines will never be crossed.
Aibileen is a black maid: smart, regal, and raising her seventeenth white child. Yet something shifted inside Aibileen the day her own son died while his bosses looked the other way. Minny, Aibileen’s best friend, is by some way the sassiest woman in Mississippi. But even her extraordinary cooking won’t protect Minny from the consequences of her tongue.
Twenty-two-year-old Skeeter returns home with a degree and a head full of hope, but her mother will not be happy until there’s a ring on her finger. Seeking solace with Constantine, the beloved maid who raised her, Skeeter finds she has gone. But why will no one tell her where?
Seemingly as different as can be, Skeeter, Aibileen and Minny’s lives converge over a clandestine project that will not only put them all at risk but also change the town of Jackson for ever. But why? And for what? The Help is a deeply moving, timeless and universal story about the lines we abide by, and the ones we won’t. It is about how women, whether mothers or daughters, the help or the boss, relate to each other – and that terrible feeling that those who look after your children may understand them, even love them, better than you…
Thanks to @EHuge for tweeting the results! The Booker, meanwhile, will be announced tonight.
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