Anne Enright's "The Gathering" has got to be the worst ever novel to have been awarded the prestigious Booker Prize. What was the award committee even thinking of when they shortlisted it from among possibly hundreds of other worthy titles ? What could they have seen in this rather unexceptional if not downright boring tale about a large damaged Irish family that led them to name it the best work of fiction for 2007 ? The Booker has been rather erratic in its choices in recent years. Unless this trend is arrested, it will become increasingly irrelevant in influencing what serious readers will eventually read.