Well, there’ll be quite a few long faces in Britain tonight, and maybe one or two very happy ones after the results of the Man Booker Prize were announced today.

There was around £100,000 in bets riding on the outcome of the Man Booker this year and the favourite by a country mile was Cloud Atlas, by David Mitchell. A William Hill (England’s largest bookmaker) spokesman said last week 'If Mitchell doesn't win it will be the biggest shock in betting terms since the Prize began … I'm convinced Mitchell will win'.

And guess what, he didn’t! It was very, very close though apparently. It took a few hours for the judges, chaired by Chris Smith, the former Labour Culture Secretary and Britain's first openly gay Cabinet minister, (all the articles say that, is it significant?) to make a decision.

The winner was The Line of Beauty by Alan Hollinghurst, ‘the first gay novel to win in 36 years’, according the Telegraph online (it doesn’t say what the last one was; who knows, I may try to track it down tomorrow if not too toddler-whipped).

Anyway, a brief synopsis:

The 20-year-old hero, shy Nick Guest, comes down from Oxford in the be-Thatcher’d summer of 1983 to London, where he takes a room in a friend’s house and begins his doctorate (on Henry James – an irony not lost, one assumes, on Colm Toibin, another strong favourite for the prize this year).

Said friend’s father is a Minister in Mrs Thatcher’s government. Nick is introduced to the seductive trappings of wealth by his adopted family and to other, more sordid pursuits (cocaine, for one) by a series of gay affairs – one of them with a young black chap and another with a depraved millionaire. He rounds it all off dancing at a party with la Thatch herself whilst completely trolleyed.

Anthony Quinn said when he interviewed Hollinghurst for the Telegraph back in April, that Hollinghurst was ‘in the prime of his writing life, and the immaculate rolling cadences of his new novel are right now the keenest pleasure English prose has to offer.’

Some say the gay sex scenes could put off people buying the book in droves as they did after DBC Pierre won the Man Booker last year (500,000 to date), others, like Anthony Quinn, say the sex has been whittled down remarkably from previous books.

Hmm. Guess we’ll just have to suck it and see. Sorry.