PETER Carey is in line to become the first writer to win the Man Booker Prize three times after being named on the longlist for this year’s award for his most recent novel.

Parrot and Olivier in America is an imaginative reworking of Alexis de Tocqueville’s examination of the fledgling nation and his writing of Democracy in America.

Carey, who comes from Bacchus Marsh but now lives in New York, was joined on the 13-book list by Christos Tsiolkas with The Slap, his popular and critical success that portrays social and sexual relations in present-day Melbourne.

Tsiolkas has already won the Commonwealth Writers’ Prize and the Victorian Premier’s prize for his novel that revolves around a slap delivered to a four- year- old boy by a man who is not a family member.

It has sold more than 100,000 copies in Australia and more than 40,000 since being published in Britain in May.

Unusually for a Booker longlist there are no first novels. But as is often the case some fancied big names are missing, notably Martin Amis’s The Pregnant Widow, Ian McEwan’s Solar and the yet- to- be published Luka and the Fire of Life by Salman Rushdie.

One major British bookmaker, Ladbrokes, installed Peter Carey as 3 – 1 favourite to claim his third Booker after winning with Oscar and Lucinda in 1988 and True History of the Kelly Gang in 2001. But another, William Hill, rated Andrea Levy, a previous winner of the Orange and Whitbread prizes, as 4 – 1 favourite for The Long Song, with Carey at 7 – 1 and Tsiolkas at 16 – 1.

The shortlist for the prize, which is worth £50,000 ($A86,000) and a huge fillip in sales to the winner, will be announced in London on September 7 and the winner on October 12. ‘‘Here are 13 exceptional novels – books we have chosen for their intrinsic quality, without reference to the past work of their authors,’‘ said chairman of judges Andrew Motion.

‘‘Wide- ranging in their geography and their concern, they tell powerful stories which make the familiar strange and cover an enormous range of history and feeling. We feel confident they will provoke and entertain.’‘

Source: The Age