Across town, exclusive parties are odd affairs

Behind the scenes at some of London's Booker night parties.

For reasons obscure, Booker-night parties tend to be thrown in London's Soho. It's something to do with honouring old traditions and a romantic hankering after the pre-corporate days of "literary Soho", when publishers such as Jonathan Cape were based nearby and writers such as George Orwell and Julian MacLaren-Ross could be found debating the state of fiction in the Wheatsheaf on Rathbone Place. Nowadays, the venue for a lively party is more likely to be one of Soho's exclusive private members' clubs - Soho House, the Union, the Groucho Club or Blacks. Each party tends to be an odd affair, mostly because the main focus of attention, the shortlisted author is elsewhere, pushing food around their plates at the Guildhall while they wait tensely for the judges' announcement, which in recent years has been timed to coincide with the BBC News at 10pm.

The parties are attended by staff from the publishers involved, literary agents, friends and family of the authors and journalists. Lots of journalists. (Only a select few are permitted to dine at the Guildhall.) Once the winner is announced, people either stay to celebrate - should they happen to be with the winning team - or gatecrash the winner's party, which, if you're lucky, is 200 metres up the road.

This year, I started at the Little, Brown Book Group's party at the Groucho - a joint bash for Simon Mawer and Sarah Waters. It started quietly, but picked up once Mawer's relatives arrived, mysteriously attired in black tie. Attempts to read the runes dominated conversations which owed more than they should to unsubstantiated rumours. Has judge X really had a falling out with judge Y over book Z? Has Waters recovered from the illness that caused her to pull out of a reading on the South Bank last night? Is it true that the winner is always seated at a particular table for technical reasons to do with camera placement?

Waters had passionate advocates, but in the last few days the relatively unknown Mawer became a serious contender. The bookies reported a surge in bets placed on him and started calling him the "dark horse candidate". Apparently, this annoyed Mawer enormously. The Random House party (for AS Byatt, JM Coetzee and Adam Foulds) was at the Union. Actually, it was more for just Byatt and Foulds: Coetzee let it be known that he wouldn't attend the ceremony. As a result, no one seriously thought he'd win, as it would create a public-relations disaster for the award's organisers

Like Waters, Byatt had passionate advocates, but the judges surprised everyone by picking Hilary Mantel, the long-standing favourite. This meant a queue for taxis to Mantel's party at the tiny, invariably packed 2 Brydges Place club off St Martin's Lane, which with its book-lined rooms and Dickensian ambience is a more literary venue than either the Union or the Groucho. Mantel's publicist made a speech, everyone cheered and waited for the author they claimed they always knew would win - "It was obvious!" - to make a suitably regal entrance.

* John O'Connell