Hilary Mantel’s ‘Wolf Hall’ the front-runner as 6 finalists vie for fiction’s Booker Prize

6 finalists await Booker Prize announcement

LONDON — A tale of political intrigue set during the reign of King Henry VIII was the bookies’ favorite to take the prestigious Man Booker prize for fiction Tuesday.

Hilary Mantel’s “Wolf Hall” was odds-on to win the 50,000-pound ($80,000) prize. Mantel’s novel charts the upheaval caused by the king’s desire to marry Anne Boleyn, as seen through the eyes of royal adviser Thomas Cromwell.

Mantel is 10-11 favorite, according to bookmakers William Hill, but faces stiff competition from a shortlist that includes previous Booker winners A.S. Byatt and J.M. Coetzee.

A victory for Coetzee’s “Summertime” would make the South African Nobel literature laureate the first writer to win the Booker three times. He took the prize in 1983 with “Life & Times of Michael K” and in 1999 with “Disgrace.”

The prize is open to novels in English by writers from Britain, Ireland or the Commonwealth of former British colonies. Apart from Coetzee, all this year’s finalists are British, and most of the books are historical novels.

Sarah Waters’ “The Little Stranger,” a spooky tale about a disintegrating upper-class family living in a crumbling country house, is set after World War II, when Britain’s class certainties were being challenged by a new social order.

Adam Foulds’ “The Quickening Maze” is inspired by 19th-century poet John Clare. Byatt, who won the Booker in 1990 for “Possession,” is nominated for the Edwardian family saga “The Children’s Book.”

A Booker win all but guarantees a a big surge in sales. Last year’s winner, Aravind Adiga’s “The White Tiger,” has sold more than half a million copies and been translated into 30 languages.

The prize always attracts bets from literary gamblers, with the winner notoriously difficult to predict.

William Hill’s Booker expert, Grahame Sharpe, said Mantel was the first odds-on favorite in Booker history — but the favorite has not won the prize in a decade.

Sharpe said there had been a flurry of bets on “The Glass Room” by the relatively unknown novelist Simon Mawer. The book tells the story of a Jewish family and their modernist house, set against the backdrop of the rise of Nazism.

“He has gone from complete outsider to second favorite,” Sharpe said. “Maybe that’s because people have noticed that in the past few years, the complete outsider has won.”

The award was founded in 1969 and was long known as the Booker Prize. It was renamed when the financial services conglomerate Man Group PLC began sponsoring it several years ago.

On the Net: www.themanbookerprize.com