Cecilia Ahern's PS I Love You and Colm Tóibín's The Master are among six Irish books longlisted for the €100,000 Impac Dublin Literary Award 2006, writes Frank McNally.
The 132-strong list, which is to be announced today, also includes Ronan Bennett's Havoc in its Third Year, Roddy Doyle's Oh, Play That Thing, Frank Delaney's Ireland, and Tina Reilly's Something Borrowed.
The longlist for the Impac - literature's most lucrative prize for a single work - is compiled from nominations by 180 library networks in 124 cities around the world.
Tóibín's book - which was shortlisted for the 2004 Man Booker Prize - tops the league of nominations with 17.
But previous winners of the 11-year-old award have included books that received a single nomination. On the 2006 list, PS I Love You is among works nominated by only one city library - in this case Liverpool's.
All 132 books on the longlist will now be read by an unpaid panel of judges including Irish writer Mary O'Donnell, Scottish novelist Andrew O'Hagan, and Dr Jane Koustas, professor of Canadian studies at University College Dublin.
A shortlist of about 10 authors will be announced next April and the winner will be named in June.
Eligibility for the longlist was confined to books published in 2004, hence the exclusion of John Banville's Man Booker Prize-winning The Sea, which came out this year.
But the list includes several novels that have already won major awards. These include the Pulitzer-winning Gilead by Marilynne Robinson - which received the most nominations (14) after The Master - and Lily Tuck's The News from Paraguay, winner of a US national book award.
The Man Booker shortlisted Cloud Atlas by David Mitchell and The Line of Beauty by Alan Hollinghurst are also nominated.
Other big names on the longlist are Tom Wolfe for I Am Charlotte Simmons and Joyce Carol Oates for The Falls. But the Impac has prided itself on introducing translated works to a wider readership; previous winners have included authors little known in the English-speaking world.
Five of the 10 previous winners have been translations into English, although this year's winner was The Known World by American Edward P Jones.
The 2006 nominees include 32 titles translated from 15 languages.