The Booker Prize for Fiction 2001: goes to The True History of the Kelly Gang by the enthralling Australian novelist Peter Carey, who becomes wih JM Coetzee one of the only two authors to win the Prize twice. Carey won the 1988 Booker Prize for Oscar and Lucinda. Two of his non-Prize-winning novels, Jack Maggs and The Unusual Life of

Tristan Smith , have been more to my taste. Here’s the shortlist.