Anne Carson's verse novel Red Doc> is heading the charge to win the inaugural Folio prize, the new literary award which is setting out to reward excellence in fiction with a £40,000 prize pot.
The Canadian poet's highly original work, which sees the mythical red-winged monster Geryon enter manhood, has been given odds of 3/1 to win the Folio by Ladbrokes, marginally ahead of Sergio De La Pava's A Naked Singularity, a novel that he originally self-published, and which is at 7/2 to take the Folio by the bookies.
Rachel Kushner's The Flamethrowers is at 4/1, said Ladbrokes, while Jane Gardam's Last Friends – the bestselling title from the shortlist, with almost 6,000 paper copies sold in the UK – at 9/2, and Amity Gaige's Schroder at 6/1. George Saunders' short story collection Tenth of December, which has sold just over 4,500 copies, according to Nielsen BookScan, is also at 6/1, with Kent Haruf's novel Benediction – reviewed in the Guardian this week as "stunningly original" – last at 7/1, along with Eimear McBride's A Girl is a Half-formed Thing.
The Folio prize will go to the book the judges – headed by poet Lavinia Greenlaw – determine best fulfils its criterion of excellence. After the 2011 Booker prize drew criticism over judges' search for "readability", and for a book's ability to "zip along", the Folio is looking "to identify works of fiction in which the story being told and the subjects being explored achieve their most perfect and thrilling expression".
Its eight shortlisted titles range from McBride's debut, a book about a young woman's relationship with her brother that led Anne Enright to call the author a "genius" in the Guardian, to US author Gaige's novel , Schroder, about a man who kidnaps his young daughter. None of the books have, to date, sold more than 6,000 copies, with Gardam's Last Friends, the third novel in her Old Filth trilogy, the only one to have breached the 5,000-copy mark, and three selling less than 1,000 copies to date.
According to Nielsen BookScan, Schroder has sold just 399 copies, with Benediction selling 731 and Red Doc> 925. A Naked Singularity has sold 1,543 copies to date, McBride's novel 2,177 and Kushner's 3,620.
Sam Jordison, who publishes A Girl is a Half-formed Thing at independent Galley Beggar Press, said he was "pleased" with sales. "Two thousand copies isn't bad for lit fic, is the first thing to say," he said, adding that a number of copies had also been sold via the publisher's own website, and as ebooks. "Winning the Goldsmiths definitely gave us a huge increase in orders, just before Christmas, and the Folio has kept things going nicely after that. I also see this kind of book being in it for the long run, and the prizes really help ensure that people will remember it for a long time to come," said Jordison. "The book has been steadily building audience over time, as word gets around, and that's pleasing too."
Jordison wished, he said, that "more people read books like Eimear's, but we always knew that it would be the choice of the – hope this doesn't sound pompous – discerning reader". He has "often joked with [McBride] about the idea of people taking a book as intense as Girl on holiday, for instance. It's a book that takes up quite a bit of mental effort and energy, and while the rewards of reading it are tremendous, I understand that not everyone is going to want to sink into it at the end of a busy working day... And I think that's true of plenty of the more demanding books on the Folio list. They're wonderful, and valuable, but I understand that they aren't for everyone."
At bookseller Foyles, Jonathan Ruppin said he had not seen a "significant increase in sales" for any of the books following the shortlist announcement, but that "more than half of them" had already "seen excellent sales".
"We anticipate a rather more noticeable impact from the announcement of the winner," said Ruppin "I remember in the first year of the then Orange prize in 1996 that demand for the winner, Helen Dunmore. A Spell of Winter, was surprisingly strong given the sales of the shortlist, but as the prize became established as part of the literary calendar, interest grew accordingly. If well managed, the Folio prize has the potential to match its influence on readers' choices, but it will take a few years."
The Folio winner will be announced on Monday 10 March.
