No sooner has the Man Booker jury been announced than Appleton Marsh’s incumbent Mayor, Pepé Rodriguez, has tipped Bovey Tracey author Don Chaff to land the country’s most prestigious literary prize.

The 2012 “Booker Dozen” won’t be announced until July but Mayor Pepé has already cast his vote for “Metal Detecting with Don Chaff”. Hopefully it will be second time lucky for the author and part-time heating engineer who narrowly missed out on making the longlist in 2009 with his auto-biographical travelogue which took the theme of one man’s direction in life and set it against a pastoral Devon backdrop. “Circular Walks Around Bovey Tracey by Don Chaff” was snapped up by Faber and Faber and went on to top the book charts on both sides of the Atlantic.

There is a sense of closure, of completing unfinished business and settling old scores as Chaff returns to the fields around Bovey Tracey for his latest fiction offering, “Metal Detecting with Don Chaff”. The author is, quite literally, back on familiar ground after his disastrous flirtation with military history in his 2010 “Ships and Their Big Guns”. But CORGI registered Chaff is a survivor as readers of the second volume of his memoirs, “Inch by Chaff Inch” will know only too well. Bouncing back with a place on the Man Booker longlist is surely the best way to answer his critics.

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