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Wales Book of the Year

Wales Book of the Year prizes are awarded annually to the best Welsh and English language works in the fields of fiction and literary criticism by Welsh or Welsh interest authors. Established in 1992, the awards are currently administered by the Academi, and supported by the Arts Council of Wales, Welsh Assembly Government and the Welsh Books Council.

The longlist of ten works in each language is published in April and the shortlist of three works in each language at the Hay Festival in May. The winners are announced in June. Since 2006, the winners have each received £10,000. From 2007, four runners-up (two in each language) also each receive £1000. In 2009, Media Wales sponsored a voted “People’s Choice” award for the English-language works.

The 2010 18th Wales Book of the Year longlist

From the tales of the Mabinogi to an account of a rural Welsh childhood in the 1920s and the diary of a modern-day police officer on the beat, the longlist for the Wales Book of the Year features an eclectic mix of subject matter and genres.

The longlists for the eighteenth Wales Book of the Year – Wales’s premier award for literature – were announced today, Tuesday 20 April at The Management Centre, Bangor Business School, North Wales. The awards, worth £10,000 to the winners, are presented to the best books of the year in the English and Welsh language.

The English language judges are poet and lecturer at the University of Wales, Ian Gregson (chair); fiction writer, James Hawes and broadcaster Sara Edwards.

The list includes debut novels from Mike Thomas and Terri Wiltshire; Alun Trevor’s memoir of a Welsh childhood; travel writing by Horatio Clare; short stories from Emyr Humphreys and poetry from Jasmine Donahaye, Philip Gross and Richard Marggraf Turley. Peter Lord is nominated for his scholarly account of the history of Welsh painting and Nikolai Tolstoy for his analysis of the origins of the Mabinogi.

On Sunday 6 June, the shortlist of three books in each language will be announced at the Guardian Hay Festival. The winners will be announced on Wednesday 30 June at a gala dinner at St David’s Hotel, Cardiff where the winners in each language will receive a cheque for £10,000 and four runners-up will each receive £1,000.

Pocket Notebook by Mike Thomas

Pocket Notebook by Mike Thomas

Meet Jacob Smith. Your good-old British policeman. The sort revered around the world. But Jacob’s no ordinary ‘tit-wearing’ beat bobby. He’s a tactical firearms officer – a handsome, popular, financially secure specialist, no less. He’s also married, with two children; a connoisseur of fine cinema, who also enjoys the occasional hit from his expansive collection of do-it-yourself ‘art’ DVDs (the latest of which was ‘borrowed’ from a flat during a drugs warrant); an amateur historian, with a keen interest in the Vietnam War. And he does like to keep himself in shape, hence the rather large steroid habit – and the even larger amount of money he owes to his dealer. And did we mention he’s partial to women’s feet? That the local shoe shop is his lap-dance palace? And the girlfriend, his little Christmas treat to himself, who’s desperately trying to shrug him off now it’s the New Year? Or what about his parents – do we really need to go there? And now his family and friends are starting to worry about our Jake …and his police superiors are increasingly taking notice of the way he conducts himself. As you can see, Jake’s a very busy boy. And his life is about to get a lot more complicated…”Pocket Notebook” is the debut novel from serving police officer Mike Thomas. An angry black comedy, it follows Jacob’s very public breakdown and subsequent fall from grace, all of which he meticulously records in his police notebook.

Carry Me Home by Terri Wiltshire

Carry Me Home by Terri Wiltshire

Lander, Alabama, 1904. When young Emma Scott claims she has been raped by a ‘black hobo’, a chain of events is triggered that will affect generations to come.

In modern-day Lander, Canaan Phillips has fled her abusive husband and returned to Lander and her fierce Southern Baptist grandmother, who brought her up after her mother’s suicide. Canaan’s one friend during her childhood was her grandmother’s simple brother, Luke. Now frail and elderly, Luke is still living in the corncrib shack that has been his home for thirty years.

In early-twentieth-century Lander, Emma Scott has taken an instant and violent dislike to her new child – a white-skinned boy named Luke. Abused and neglected, Luke eventually befriends Squeaky, a black boy whose family farms nearby. When tragedy strikes, Luke takes to the railroad, and as he enters manhood on the rails, we begin to discover the truth behind the events that led to his birth.

In the twentieth century, Canaan, too, is slowly coming to terms with her painful past. And, with the help of her adored Uncle Luke, she is learning to love again.

This is a heart-rending and luminous story about loyalty, hardship, love and friendship. It is also a reminder that goodness can prevail even through the cruellest hardships.

The Songbird Is Singing by Alun Trevor

The Songbird Is Singing by Alun Trevor

Based on the life of the author’s father, this narrative follows the famous Welsh tenor Jabez Trevor as he tours North America with the Welsh Imperial Singers. The story is recalled by the 80-year-old Arthur as he reminiscences with his brother, Alun, about their childhood. They eagerly awaited news from their father’s trips, enthusiastically reading about the 1920s and airships, prohibition, Al Capone, talkies, gramophones, and the Empire State Building through postcards and letters. Presents would arrive from Chicago, Winnipeg, and New York, offering visions of the world as seen through their father’s eyes. Haunting and beautiful, this music-filled memoir tells with joyful immediacy of a time long gone, exacting the thrill and excitement of the world before the Great Depression.

A Single Swallow by Horatio Clare

A Single Swallow by Horatio Clare

From the slums of Cape Town to the palaces of Algiers, through Pygmy villages where pineapples grow wild, to the Gulf of Guinea where the sea blazes with oil flares, across two continents and fourteen countries – this epic journey is nothing to swallows, they do it twice a year. But for Horatio Clare, writer and birdwatcher, it is the expedition of a lifetime. Along the way he discovers old empires and modern tribes, a witch-doctor’s recipe for stewed swallow, explains how to travel without money or a passport, and describes a terrifying incident involving three Spanish soldiers and a tiny orange dog. By trains, motorbikes, canoes, one camel and three ships, Clare follows the swallows from reed beds in South Africa, where millions roost in February, to a barn in Wales, where a pair nest in May.

The Woman at the Window by Emyr Humphreys

The Woman at the Window by Emyr Humphreys

Gentle but haunting, this selection of short stories takes a closer look at the importance of parental and filial love down the generations. The protagonists reminisce over the pattern of their lives, looking back as well as forward, for the chance to rekindle lost loves and find a home for themselves. Throughout these eclectic tales, three comfortably retired men find their sedate dinner transformed into a conflict with a knife-wielding escaped prisoner in a pre-Celtic tomb, a trip to the site of their first meeting brings a married couple face to face with a corpse, and illusions are shattered when a retired teacher reunites with his first love. Examining the threads of survivors’ lives from childhood to old age, this anthology utilizes the backdrop of a shifting postwar Europe and Wales. Weighing the best part of a century of European history, this is a complex study of mature reflection, loss, and survival.

Self-Portrait as Ruth by Jasmine Donahaye

Self-Portrait as Ruth by Jasmine Donahaye

“Self-Portrait as Ruth” is a provocative collection exploring the subject of Israel-Palestine in sharp, accessible poems that eschew the conventional language or orientation of either Zionist or Palestinian solidarity. Rooted in a Jewish family history that reaches into nineteenth-century Ottoman Palestine, “Self-Portrait as Ruth” is written in defiance of all ‘official’ versions of Israeli or Palestinian history. Polemical in places, the densely, painfully political subject matter is humanised throughout by a weaving together of individual and community, family and tribe, lover and self, nation and landscape. These poems are interrogations of the first person possessive – of claims, both singular and plural, to land, to identity, to history, and to the body – and of wounds and victimisation, both unique and collective. The subject matter is relentlessly topical and contested, whether focusing on the Palestinian story of catastrophe explored here in the lyrical love-poem Palestina, or on questions of Jewish guilt, investigated to forensic extent in poems such as “My Father’s Circumcision”, with its ‘innocent’ circumciser who, ‘with his ragged nail/tears the foreskin’ and ‘bends his head to suck the wound’, and in the short poem “Fetishes”, which juxtaposes anal sex and masturbation with perhaps the world’s most contentious place: the Western Wall in East Jerusalem. The concluding question, ‘how can you be sure the bloodprice that you paid will be enough?’ takes the moral interrogation of this collection beyond the topical matter of Israel-Palestine to universal issues of guilt and accountability. A challenging, aching, honest exploration of culpability, this lament will incite controversy and debate, making uncomfortable reading for partisans and non-partisans alike.

I Spy Pinhold Eye by Philip Gross

I Spy Pinhold Eye by Philip Gross

Fresh, creative, intellectually challenging and innovative—one of the finest collaborations between poet and photographer.

Wan-Hu’s Flying Chair by Richard Marggraf Turley

Wan-Hu’s Flying Chair by Richard Marggraf Turley

“Wan-Hu’s Flying Chair” explores the ‘furious stillness’ of love and art. From Chinese legends to scenes from artists’ studios, these poems open apertures on twilit worlds, where the ‘elastic collision of lovers’ burns, ears clang to the ‘torture of air’, and ‘winged creatures quiver on springs’. Here, the voices of old masters and artists’ wives, of holy men ‘huddled round three-legged dings’ and steam engineers dissolve into a curious chorus. In this collection, language seeks to break the ‘well of gravity’ as it ‘tidies the dark.’

The Meaning of Pictures by Peter Lord

The Meaning of Pictures by Peter Lord

Why do Welsh pictures painted between the eighteenth and the twentieth centuries still matter today? This volume is mainly concerned with how pictures are understood by the people who use them—including patrons, museum curators, and the general public—rather than by the painters who paint them. The Meaning of Pictures discusses different aspects of painting unified by this common theme, including such topics as eighteenth-century painting, nineteenth-century genres, how pictures are valued by the art market, and how, since the 1980s, the Welsh art world has fought a reactionary battle against the New Art History movement.

(Source: Academi)

The Miles Franklin Literary Award

The Miles Franklin Literary Award is an annual literary prize for the best Australian ‘published novel or play portraying Australian life in any of its phases’. The award was set up according to the will  of Miles Franklin (1879 – 1954), who is best known for writing the Australian classic My Brilliant Career (published in 1901) and for bequeathing her estate to fund this award. As of 2008, the award is worth AU$42,000.

Miles Franklin

Miles Franklin

Miles Franklin (born “Stella Maria Sarah Miles Franklin”; 14 October 1879 – 19 September 1954) was an Australian writer and feminist who is best known for her autobiographical novel, My Brilliant Career, published in 1901. While she wrote throughout her life, her other major literary success, All That Swagger, was not published until 1936.

She was committed to the development of a uniquely Australian form of literature, and she actively pursued this goal by supporting writers, literary journals, and writers’ organisations. She has had a long-lasting impact on Australian literary life through her endowment of a major literary award known as the Miles Franklin Award.

The 2010 Miles Franklin Literary Award Shortlist

On Wednesday 21 April, Trust announced the six authors and their novels selected for the 2010 shortlist.

The 2010 shortlist features some of Australia’s most established literary names alongside new and emerging authors, each showcasing Australian character and creativity.

The judging panel are excited by the diverse range of novels and what this means for Australian literature.

In deciding on a shortlist of six, longer than usual, the judges have acknowledged the quality of the works offered this year, and also their extreme diversity. The six novels chosen cover an extraordinary range. Their sheer quality, what Miles Franklin would have termed their ‘literary merit’, makes pigeonholing them impossible. Notions of genre could not contain them. Ideas about specific audience – is this young adult or adult fiction? – proved irrelevant. And in their exposition of Australian life ‘in any of its phases’, the six shortlisted writers gave the judges an exhilarating sense of just how bewilderingly varied those phases of Australian life could be. It has been a fascinating and challenging year.

The Miles Franklin Literary Award 2010 Presentation dinner will be held on 22 June 2010.

Lovesong by Alex Miller (Allen & Unwin)

Lovesong by Alex Miller

Seeking shelter in a Parisian cafe from a sudden rainstorm, John Patterner meets the exotic Sabiha and his carefully mapped life changes forever. Resonant of the bestselling Conditions of Faith, Alex Miller’s keenly awaited new novel tells the deeply moving story of their lives together, and of how each came undone by desire.

Strangers did not, as a rule, find their way to Chez Dom, a small, rundown Tunisian cafe on Paris’ distant fringes. Run by the widow Houria and her young niece, Sabiha, the cafe offers a home away from home for the North African immigrant workers working at the great abattoirs of Vaugiraud, who, like them, had grown used to the smell of blood in the air. But when one day a lost Australian tourist, John Patterner, seeks shelter in the cafe from a sudden Parisian rainstorm, a tragic love story begins to unfold.

Years later, while living a quiet life in suburban Melbourne, John is haunted by what happened to him and Sabiha at Vaugiraud. He confides his story to Ken, an ageing writer, who sees in John’s account the possibility for one last simple love story. When Ken tells his daughter this she reminds him ‘Love is never simple, Dad. You should know that.’ He does know it. But being the writer he is, he cannot resist the lure of the story.

Told with all Miller’s distinctive clarity, intelligence and compassion, Lovesong is a pitch-perfect novel, a tender and enthralling story about the intimate lives of ordinary people. Like the truly great novelist he is, Miller locates the heart of his story in the moral frailties and secret passions of his all-too-human characters.

The Bath Fugues by Brian Castro (Giramondo Publishing)

The Bath Fugues by Brian Castro

The Bath Fugues is a meditation on art and melancholy, in the form of three interwoven novellas, centred respectively on an aging art forger; a Portuguese poet, opium addict and art collector; and a doctor, who has built an art gallery in tropical Queensland. Each deals with issues of sincerity and deception, counterfeiting and rewriting, transmission and identity, as the characters try to make sense of their intertwined lives and anxieties, and the fragile friendships thrust upon them. Only the act of bathing will reconcile them to truth and revelation.

Jason Redvers, a drifter, fugitive and art forger, is slowly and painfully dying. Convinced that his memories and history have been wrongfully appropriated by Walter Gottlieb, his one-time mentor and patron, Redvers is driven to write a memoir, exposing and excising all kinds of scandals and secrets about his friends and colleagues. The second novella shifts focus to a Portuguese judge and poet, living in Macau in the 1920s, in a selfimposed exile of mistresses, opium pipes and Chinese art. Struggling with his desire to create, and procreate, Camilo Conceição descends slowly into madness, forgery and squalour. The third section returns to Australia, and takes up the story of a doctor, Judith Sarraute. Professionally privileged to the most intimate thoughts, secrets and desires of her clients, and to a cabinet of exotic venoms, Sarraute is troubled by the theft of her diaries, and the shadowy figure of a grifter, drifting at the edges of her carefully maintained world.

Jasper Jones by Craig Silvey (Allen & Unwin)

Jasper Jones by Craig Silvey

Late on a hot summer night in the tail end of 1965, Charlie Bucktin, a precocious and bookish boy of thirteen, is startled by an urgent knock on the window of his sleep-out. His visitor is Jasper Jones, an outcast in the regional mining town of Corrigan. Rebellious, mixed-race and solitary, Jasper is a distant fi gure of danger and intrigue for Charlie. So when Jasper begs for his help, Charlie eagerly steals into the night by his side, terribly afraid but desperate to impress.

Jasper takes him through town and to his secret glade in the bush, and it’s here that Charlie bears witness to Jasper’s horrible discovery. With his secret like a brick in his belly, Charlie is pushed and pulled by a town closing in on itself in fear and suspicion as he locks horns with his tempestuous mother; falls nervously in love and battles to keep a lid on his zealous best friend, Jeffrey Lu.

And in vainly attempting to restore the parts that have been shaken loose, Charlie learns to discern the truth from the myth, and why white lies creep like a curse. In the simmering summer where everything changes, Charlie learns why the truth of things is so hard to know, and even harder to hold in his heart.

The Book of Emmett by Deborah Forster (Random House)

The Book of Emmett by Deborah Forster

Emmett Brown is as dark as Heathcliff, and as moody. A waylaid romantic with one hand on Hemingway and the other around a bottle. Sometimes he’s an inspiration, but not often. His one obsession is working out ‘the System’, a way to bend mathematical probability to his will and his fortune. But when the lottery numbers and horses fail him, he spirals further into self-loathing and becomes a terror to his wife and children.

For the innocents – Louisa, Rob, Peter, Daniel and Jessie – the bonds formed hiding in hedges at the end of the street waiting for maelstroms to pass, are complex, strong and impossible to break. As they grow older, each must resolve the consequences of Emmett’s rage on their spirit and psyche, and attempt to escape his long shadow.

As Emmett lay dying, they come to discover that love – however imperfect – is the best protection against pain.

Truth by Peter Temple (Text Publishing)

Truth by Peter Temple

At the close of a long day, Inspector Stephen Villani stands in the bathroom of a luxury apartment high above the city of Melbourne. In the glass bath, a young woman lies dead, a panic button within reach.

Villani’s life is his work. It is his identity, his calling, his touchstone. But now, over a few sweltering summer days, as fires burn across the state and his superior and colleagues scheme and jostle, he finds all the certainties of his life are crumbling.

Truth is a novel about a man, a family, a city. It is about violence, murder, love, corruption, honour and deceit.

And it is about truth.

Truth is a companion piece of sorts, to Temple’s The Broken Shore. The protagonist here is Detective Inspector Stephen Villani, friend and former colleague of The Broken Shore’s hero Joe Cashin.

Set predominantly in Melbourne, the ongoing theme is that there is something rotten in the state of Victoria, and in Villani’s life. It begins with Villani driving between two shocking cases, and ends in devastating bushfire. In between things get complex, with political and police corruption, family disintegration on many levels, linked murders, work hierarchy, political changeover and personal issues for Villani to deal with.

Butterfly by Sonya Hartnett (Penguin Group Australia)

Butterfly by Sonya Hartnett

On the verge of her fourteenth birthday, Plum knows her life will change. But she has no idea how.

Over the coming weeks, her beautiful neighbour Maureen will show her how she might fly. Her adored older brothers will court catastrophe in worlds that she barely knows exist. And her friends – her worst enemies – will tease and test, smelling weakness. They will try to lead her on and take her down.

Who ever forgets what happens when you’re fourteen?

(Source: Trust Company Limited)

The 6 books are:

• The Birds on the Trees by Nina Bawden (Virago)

• Troubles by J G Farrell (Phoenix)

• The Bay of Noon by Shirley Hazzard (Virago)

• Fire From Heaven by Mary Renault (Arrow)

• The Driver’s Seat by Muriel Spark (Penguin)

• The Vivisector by Patrick White (Vintage)

The winner of The Lost Man Booker Prize will be decided by the international reading public. Readers are invited to cast their vote here. Public voting closes on 23 April 2010. After that, the overall winner will be announced on 19 May 2010.

1. Rosie Alison, The Very Thought of You

England, 31st August 1939: the world is on the brink of war. As Hitler prepares to invade Poland, thousands of children are evacuated from London to escape the impending Blitz. Torn from her mother, eight-year-old Anna Sands is relocated with other children to a large Yorkshire estate which has been opened up to evacuees by Thomas and Elizabeth Ashton, an enigmatic childless couple. Soon Anna gets drawn into their unhappy relationship, seeing things that are not meant for her eyes – and finding herself part-witness and part-accomplice to a love affair, with tragic consequences. A story of love, loss and complicated loyalties, combining a sweeping narrative with subtle psychological observation, “The Very Thought of You” is a haunting and memorable debut.

2. Eleanor Catton, The Rehearsal

A high-school sex scandal jolts a group of teenage girls into a new awareness of their own potency and power. The sudden and total publicity seems to turn every act into a performance and every platform into a stage. But when the local drama school decides to turn the scandal into a show, the real world and the world of the theatre are forced to meet, and soon the boundaries between private and public begin to dissolve. “The Rehearsal” is an exhilarating and provocative novel about the unsimple mess of human desire, at once a tender evocation of its young protagonists and a shrewd expose of emotional compromise.

3. Clare Clark, Savage Lands

It is 1704 and, while the Sun King Louis XIV rules France from the splendour of Versailles, Louisiana, the new and vast colony named in his honour, is home to fewer than two hundred souls. When a demand is sent requesting wives be dispatched for the struggling settlers, Elisabeth is among the twenty-three girls who set sail from France to be married to men of whom they know absolutely nothing. Educated and skeptical, Elisabeth has little hope for happiness in her new life. It is to her astonishment that she, alone among the brides, finds herself passionately in love with her new husband, Jean-Claude, a charismatic and ruthlessly ambitious soldier. Auguste, a poor cabin boy from Rochefort, must also adjust to a startlingly unexpected future. Abandoned in a remote native village, he is charged by the colony’s governor with mastering the tribe’s strange language while reporting back on their activities. It is there that he is befriended by Elisabeth’s husband as he begins the slow process of assimilation back into life among the French. The love Elisabeth and Auguste share for Jean-Claude changes both of their lives irrevocably. When in time he betrays them both, they find themselves bound together in ways they never anticipated. With the same compelling prose and vividly realized characters that won her widespread acclaim for THE GREAT STINK and THE NATURE OF MONSTERS, Clare Clark takes us deep into the heart of colonial French Louisiana.

4. Amanda Craig, Hearts and Minds

Rich or poor, five people, seemingly very different, find their lives in the capital connected in undreamed-of ways. There is Job, the illegal mini-cab driver whose wife in Zimbabwe no longer answers his letters; Ian, the idealistic supply teacher in exile from South Africa; Katie from New York, jilted and miserable as a dogsbody at a political magazine, and fifteen-year-old Anna, trafficked into sexual slavery. Polly Noble, an overworked human rights lawyer, knows better than most how easy it is to fall through the cracks into the abyss. Yet when her au pair, Iryna, disappears, Polly’s own needs and beliefs drag her family into a world of danger, deceit and terror. Riveting, humane, engaging, HEARTS AND MINDS is a novel that is both entertaining and prepared to ask the most serious questions about the way we live.

5. Roopa Farooki, The Way Things Look to Me

Yasmin is special. An autistic teenager with high-performing Aspergers, she has near magical abilities with regard to memory and mathematics but little understanding of how she has affected her older brother and sister, who suffered from emotional neglect as they were never given the time or attention that they also needed. Lila has been competing for attention against her damaged, special little sister for almost as long as she can remember. She attributes almost every bad thing in her life to her sister’s existence: her debilitating stress-related eczema, her failing career, and her string of emotionally stunted relationships. Then she finally meets someone who can help her understand that many of her problems, however unpleasant they are, are only skin deep. Asif; older and therefore, supposedly, wiser than his younger sisters is forced to take responsibility for Yasmin when their mother passes away. He can’t help thinking, with agonies of guilt, how much easier life would be if she had never been born. He wishes that he was special and gifted like Yasmin, he wishes that he was outrageous and alive like Lila – he wishes he was loved. A touching, humorous story of three siblings trying to reconcile with life, their dreams and each other…

6. Rebecca Gowers, The Twisted Heart

Kit, a work-obsessed literature student, decides on a whim to go to a dance class. And for a while it looks like Joe, the shadowy figure she meets there, may tempt her to put her books aside and live a little. But as Joe’s world becomes increasingly threatening and Kit’s research leads her to stumble on an extraordinary historical mystery, she is faced with a choice. Will she hide herself away in her studies or will she make the leap of faith that could change her existence forever?

7. M.J. Hyland, This is How

M. J. Hyland is the multi-award-winning and Man Booker–shortlisted author of Carry Me Down. Her third novel, This Is How, is a psychologically probing and deeply moving account of a perpetual outsider longing to find his niche. When Patrick Oxtoby’s fiancée breaks off their engagement, he leaves home and moves to a remote seaside village. In spite of his hopes for a new and better life, Patrick struggles to fit in and make the right impression. Certain that his new friends are conspiring against him, and with his already fragile personality further fractured, he takes a course of action that permanently alters his life. This Is How is a mesmerizing and meticulously drawn portrait of a man whose unease in the world leads to his tragic undoing. With breathtaking wisdom and astute insight into the human mind, Hyland’s latest is a masterpiece that arouses horror and sympathy in equal measure.

8. Sadie Jones, Small Wars

Hal Treherne is a young and dedicated soldier on the brink of a brilliant career. Impatient to see action, his other deep commitment is to Clara, his beautiful ‘red, white and blue girl’, who sustains him as he rises through the ranks. When Hal is transferred to the Mediterranean, Clara, now his wife, and their baby daughters join him. But Cyprus is no ‘sunshine posting’, and the island is in the heat of the Emergency: the British are defending the colony against Cypriots – schoolboys and armed guerrillas alike – battling for enosis, union with Greece. The skirmishes are far from glorious and operations often rough and bloody. Still, in serving his country and leading his men, Hal has a taste of triumph. Clara shares his sense of duty. She must settle down, make no fuss, smile. But action changes Hal, and Clara becomes fearful – of the lethal tit-for-tat beyond the army base, and her increasingly distant husband. The atrocities Hal is drawn into take him further from Clara; a betrayal that is only part of the shocking personal crisis to come. The prizewinning and bestselling author of The Outcast returns with an emotionally powerful portrait of a marriage in extremis and a world-view in question. Sadie Jones has produced a passionate, gut-wrenching and brilliantly researched depiction of a ‘small war’ with devastating consequences; and in doing so, raises important questions that resonate profoundly today.

9. Barbara Kingsolver, The Lacuna

In her most accomplished novel, Barbara Kingsolver takes us on an epic journey from the Mexico City of artists Diego Rivera and Frida Kahlo to the America of Pearl Harbor, FDR, and J. Edgar Hoover. The Lacuna is a poignant story of a man pulled between two nations as they invent their modern identities. Born in the United States, reared in a series of provisional households in Mexico—from a coastal island jungle to 1930s Mexico City—Harrison Shepherd finds precarious shelter but no sense of home on his thrilling odyssey. Life is whatever he learns from housekeepers who put him to work in the kitchen, errands he runs in the streets, and one fateful day, by mixing plaster for famed Mexican muralist Diego Rivera. He discovers a passion for Aztec history and meets the exotic, imperious artist Frida Kahlo, who will become his lifelong friend. When he goes to work for Lev Trotsky, an exiled political leader fighting for his life, Shepherd inadvertently casts his lot with art and revolution, newspaper headlines and howling gossip, and a risk of terrible violence. Meanwhile, to the north, the United States will soon be caught up in the internationalist goodwill of World War II. There in the land of his birth, Shepherd believes he might remake himself in America’s hopeful image and claim a voice of his own. He finds support from an unlikely kindred soul, his stenographer, Mrs. Brown, who will be far more valuable to her employer than he could ever know. Through darkening years, political winds continue to toss him between north and south in a plot that turns many times on the unspeakable breach—the lacuna—between truth and public presumption. With deeply compelling characters, a vivid sense of place, and a clear grasp of how history and public opinion can shape a life, Barbara Kingsolver has created an unforgettable portrait of the artist—and of art itself. The Lacuna is a rich and daring work of literature, establishing its author as one of the most provocative and important of her time.

10. Laila Lalami, Secret Son

Raised by his mother in a one-room house in the slums of Casablanca, Youssef El Mekki has always had big dreams of living another life in another world. Suddenly his dreams are within reach when he discovers that his father—whom he’d been led to believe was dead—is very much alive. A wealthy businessman, he seems eager to give his son a new start. Youssef leaves his mother behind to live a life of luxury, until a reversal of fortune sends him back to the streets and his childhood friends. Trapped once again by his class and painfully aware of the limitations of his prospects, he becomes easy prey for a fringe Islamic group. In the spirit of The Inheritance of Loss and The Reluctant Fundamentalist, Laila Lalami’s debut novel looks at the struggle for identity, the need for love and family, and the desperation that grips ordinary lives in a world divided by class, politics, and religion.

11. Andrea Levy, The Long Song

July is a slave girl who lives upon a sugar plantation named Amity and it is her life that is the subject of this tale. She was there when the Baptist War raged in 1831, and she was also present when slavery was declared no more. My son says I must convey how the story tells also of July’s mama Kitty, of the negroes that worked the plantation land, of Caroline Mortimer the white woman who owned the plantation and many more persons besides – far too many for me to list here. But what befalls them all is carefully chronicled upon these pages for you to peruse. Perhaps, my son suggests, I might write that it is a thrilling journey through that time in the company of people who lived it. All this he wishes me to pen so the reader can decide if this is a book they might care to consider. Cha, I tell my son, what fuss-fuss. Come, let them just read it for themselves.

12. Attica Locke, Black Water Rising

Writing in the tradition of Dennis Lehane and Greg Iles, Attica Locke, a powerful new voice in American fiction, delivers a brilliant debut thriller that readers will not soon forget. Jay Porter is hardly the lawyer he set out to be. His most promising client is a low-rent call girl and he runs his fledgling law practice out of a dingy strip mall. But he’s long since made peace with not living the American Dream and carefully tucked away his darkest sins: the guns, the FBI file, the trial that nearly destroyed him. Houston, Texas, 1981. It is here that Jay believes he can make a fresh start. That is, until the night in a boat out on the bayou when he impulsively saves a woman from drowning—and opens a Pandora’s box. Her secrets put Jay in danger, ensnaring him in a murder investigation that could cost him his practice, his family, and even his life. But before he can get to the bottom of a tangled mystery that reaches into the upper echelons of Houston’s corporate power…

13. Hilary Mantel, Wolf Hall

‘Lock Cromwell in a deep dungeon in the morning,’ says Thomas More, ‘and when you come back that night he’ll be sitting on a plush cushion eating larks’ tongues, and all the gaolers will owe him money.’ England, the 1520s. Henry VIII is on the throne, but has no heir. Cardinal Wolsey is his chief advisor, charged with securing the divorce the pope refuses to grant. Into this atmosphere of distrust and need comes Thomas Cromwell, first as Wolsey’s clerk, and later his successor. Cromwell is a wholly original man: the son of a brutal blacksmith, a political genius, a briber, a charmer, a bully, a man with a delicate and deadly expertise in manipulating people and events. Ruthless in pursuit of his own interests, he is as ambitious in his wider politics as he is for himself. His reforming agenda is carried out in the grip of a self-interested parliament and a king who fluctuates between romantic passions and murderous rages. From one of our finest living writers, Wolf Hall is that very rare thing: a truly great English novel, one that explores the intersection of individual psychology and wider politics. With a vast array of characters, and richly overflowing with incident, it peels back history to show us Tudor England as a half-made society, moulding itself with great passion and suffering and courage.

14. Maria McCann, The Wilding

In her second novel Maria McCann returns to 17th-century England, where life is struggling to return to normal after the horrific tumult of the Civil War. In the village of Spadboro Jonathan Dymond, a 26-year-old cider-maker who lives with his parents, has until now enjoyed a quiet, harmonious existence. As the novel opens, a letter arrives from his uncle with a desperate request to speak with his father. When his father returns from the visit the next day, all he can say is that Jonathan’s uncle has died. Then Jonathan finds a fragment of the letter in the family orchard, with talk of inheritance and vengeance. He resolves to unravel the mystery at the heart of his family – a mystery which will eventually threaten the lives and happiness of Jonathan and all those he holds dear.

15. Nadifa Mohamed, Black Mamba Boy

Aden,1935; a city vibrant, alive, and full of hidden dangers. And home to Jama, a ten year-old boy. But then his mother dies unexpectedly and he finds himself alone in the world. Jama is forced home to his native Somalia, the land of his nomadic ancestors. War is on the horizon and the fascist Italian forces who control parts of East Africa are preparing for battle. Yet Jama cannot rest until he discovers whether his father, who has been absent from his life since he was a baby, is alive somewhere. And so begins an epic journey which will take Jama north through Djibouti, war-torn Eritrea and Sudan, to Egypt. And from there, aboard a ship transporting Jewish refugees just released from German concentration camp, across the seas to Britain and freedom. This story of one boy’s long walk to freedom is also the story of how the Second World War affected Africa and its people; a story of displacement and family.

16. Lorrie Moore, A Gate at the Stairs

In her best-selling story collection, Birds of America, Lorrie Moore wrote about the disconnect between men and women, about the precariousness of women on the edge, and about loneliness and loss. Now, in her dazzling new novel—her first in more than a decade—Moore turns her eye on the anxiety and disconnection of post-9/11 America, on the insidiousness of racism, the blind-sidedness of war, and the recklessness thrust on others in the name of love. As the United States begins gearing up for war in the Middle East, twenty-year-old Tassie Keltjin, the Midwestern daughter of a gentleman hill farmer—his “Keltjin potatoes” are justifiably famous—has come to a university town as a college student, her brain on fire with Chaucer, Sylvia Plath, Simone de Beauvoir. Between semesters, she takes a job as a part-time nanny. The family she works for seems both mysterious and glamorous to her, and although Tassie had once found children boring, she comes to care for, and to protect, their newly adopted little girl as her own. As the year unfolds and she is drawn deeper into each of these lives, her own life back home becomes ever more alien to her: her parents are frailer; her brother, aimless and lost in high school, contemplates joining the military. Tassie finds herself becoming more and more the stranger she felt herself to be, and as life and love unravel dramatically, even shockingly, she is foreverchanged. This long-awaited new novel by one of the most heralded writers of the past two decades is lyrical, funny, moving, and devastating; Lorrie Moore’s most ambitious book to date—textured, beguiling, and wise.

17. Monique Roffey, The White Woman on the Green Bicycle

An unforgettable love story, brimming with passion and politics, set over fifty years in Trinidad – a place at times enchanting, and at times highly dangerous . . . When George and Sabine Harwood arrive in Trinidad from England as young newlyweds, they have with them just a couple of suitcases and Sabine’s prized green bicycle. Their intention is to stay for not more then three years, but George falls in love with the island. Sabine, however, is ill at ease with the racial segregation and unrest in her new home, and takes solace in the freedom of her green bicycle. George and Sabine become more entangled in their life on the island – in all its passion and betrayals – and Sabine’s bicycle takes her places she wouldn’t otherwise go. One day George make a discovery that forces him to realise that extent of the secrets between them, and is seized by an urgent, desperate need to prove his love for her – with tragic consequences.

18. Amy Sackville, The Still Point

At the turn of the twentieth century, Arctic explorer Edward Mackley sets out to reach the North Pole and vanishes into the icy landscape without a trace. He leaves behind a young wife, Emily, who awaits his return for decades, her dreams and devotion gradually freezing into rigid widowhood. A hundred years later, on a sweltering mid-summer’s day, Edward’s great-grand-niece Julia moves through the old family house, attempting to impose some order on the clutter of inherited belongings and memories from that ill-fated expedition, and taking care to ignore the deepening cracks within her own marriage. But as afternoon turns into evening, Julia makes a discovery that splinters her long-held image of Edward and Emily’s romance, and her husband Simon faces a precipitous choice that will decide the future of their relationship. Sharply observed and deeply engaging, The Still Point is a powerful literary debut, and a moving meditation on the distances – geographical and emotional – that can exist between two people.

19. Kathryn Stockett, The Help

Be prepared to meet three unforgettable women: Twenty-two-year-old Skeeter has just returned home after graduating from Ole Miss. She may have a degree, but it is 1962, Mississippi, and her mother will not be happy till Skeeter has a ring on her finger. Skeeter would normally find solace with her beloved maid Constantine, the woman who raised her, but Constantine has disappeared and no one will tell Skeeter where she has gone. Aibileen is a black maid, a wise, regal woman raising her seventeenth white child. Something has shifted inside her after the loss of her own son, who died while his bosses looked the other way. She is devoted to the little girl she looks after, though she knows both their hearts may be broken. Minny, Aibileen’s best friend, is short, fat, and perhaps the sassiest woman in Mississippi. She can cook like nobody’s business, but she can’t mind her tongue, so she’s lost yet another job. Minny finally finds a position working for someone too new to town…

20. Sarah Waters, The Little Stranger

In a dusty post-war summer in rural Warwickshire, a doctor is called to a patient at lonely Hundreds Hall. Home to the Ayres family for over two centuries, the Georgian house, once grand and handsome, is now in decline, its masonry crumbling, its gardens choked with weeds, its owners ? mother, son and daughter ? struggling to keep pace. But are the Ayreses haunted by something more sinister than a dying way of life? Little does Dr Faraday know how closely, and how terrifyingly, their story is about to become entwined with his.

The Man Booker Prize

Back in 1971, the Booker Prize was revamped to honour the best novel of the year based on its year of publications. In doing so, many books published in 1970 were left out in the dark with no opportunity of winning a Booker Prize… until this year. The Lost Man Booker Prize is the brainchild of Peter Straus, honorary archivist to the Booker Prize Foundation.

A panel of 3 judges has been appointed to select a shortlist of 6 novels from a longlist of 22 books published during that period. They are Rachel Cooke, Katie Derham and Tobias Hill. These books would have been eligible and are still in print today. They are:

A Guilty Thing Surprised by Ruth Rendell

• The Hand Reared Boy by Brian Aldisso
• A Little Of What You Fancy? by H.E.Bates
• The Birds On The Trees by Nina Bawden
• A Place In England by Melvyn Bragg
• Down All The Days by Christy Brown
• Bomber by Len Deighton
• Troubles by J.G.Farrell
• The Circle by Elaine Feinstein
• The Bay Of Noon by Shirley Hazzard
• A Clubbable Woman by Reginald Hill
• I’m The King Of The Castle by Susan Hill
• A Domestic Animal by Francis King
• Fire Dwellers by  Margaret Laurence
• Out Of The Shelter by David Lodge
• A Fairly Honourable Defeat by Iris Murdoch
• Fireflies by Shiva Naipaul
• Master and Commander by Patrick O’Brian,
• Head To Toe by Joe Orton,
• Fire From Heaven by Mary Renault
• A Guilty Thing Surprised by Ruth Rendell
• The Driver’s Seat by Muriel Spark
• The Vivisector by Patrick White

The shortlist will be announced in March but, as with the Best of the Booker in 2008, the international reading public will decide the winner by voting via the Man Booker Prize website. The overall winner will be announced in May.

***

In London, Tuesdau. 26th January 2010, the Overall Winner was announed and the award goes to ….. poet Christopher Reid for A Scattering, a compilation of poems dedicated to his late wife, Lucinda Gane. Along with the award, Reid won £30,000. 

Christopher Reid was born in Hong Kong in 1949 and now lives in London. He studied at Oxford before becoming a journalist and book reviewer. He was Poetry Editor at Faber and Faber from 1991 to 1999, and Professor in Creative Writing at the University of Hull from 2007 to 2009. He also runs his own independent publishing house, Ondt and Gracehoper, and is a fellow of the Royal Society of Literature.

Reid’s poetry collections include Arcadia (1979), which won both the Somerset Maugham Award and the Hawthornden prize, Katerina Brac (1985) and All Sorts, his first book of poems for children, which won the Signal Poetry Award in 2000. A Scattering and The Song of Lunch were both published in 2009.  A Scattering has also been nominated for Britain’s Forward Poetry Prize and the T.S. Eliot Prize for Poetry. His edition of Letters of Ted Hughes, published in 2007, was recently released in paperback.

The Costa Book Awards was pretty much unheard of, here – until 2005, when Malaysian-born Tash Aw won the award for Best First Novel for his book, The Harmony Silk Factory. His second book, The Invisible Map, was released last year.

The Costa Book Awards was previously known as the The Whitbread Literary Awards.  Costa, a growing coffee shop chain in UK took over the ownership of the Book Awards in 2006. The Costa Book Awards has 5 categories and the winner of each category will win £ 5,000. The 2009 winners were announced on 5th January 2010. They are, as follows:

• Costa Novel Award: Brooklyn by Colm Tóibin
  • Back in the early 1950s, Eilis Lacey emigrated to Brooklyn, New York, leaving behind her Irish family. Though far from home, Eilis takes tentative steps towards new friendships, and perhaps a little more too. Then, she receives news which sends her back to Ireland. There, she is confronted by a dilemma – to choose between duty and one great love.
• First Novel Award: Beauty by Raphael Selbourne.
  • Beauty is a 20 year-old Bangladeshi who shocked her family by fleeing an abusive arranged marriage. Forced to look for a job, her encounters with officialdom, fellow claimants, and cityh street strangers and the restrictions (and comfort) of her language and culture, place her at the mercy of unlikely helpers such as Mark, a friendly ex-offender and Peter, a middle-class underachiever. Such ‘white’ influences conflict with pressure of her family’s religious line, but they enable Beauty to understand better how free-will and parental care can affect her personal destiny.
• Biography Award: The Strangest Man: The Hidden Life of Paul Dirac, Quantum Genius by Graham Farmelo.
  • Paul Dirac was one of the leading pioneers of a science revolution: the quantum mechanics. He was also pathologically reticent, literal-minded and unable to communicate or empathize. Yet, based on a previously undiscovered archive of family papers and Dirac’s massive achievements, Graham Farmelo draws  a compassionate portrait of the life and work of  this Novel Prize winner. Farmelo shows a man who, while hopelessly socially inept, could manage to love and sustain close friendship.
• Poetry Award: A Scattering by Christopher Reid
  • This collection of four poetic sequences were written in memory and in tribute to Reid’s wife following her death in October 2005.
• Children’s Book Award: Chaos Walking #2: The Ask and the Answer by Patrick Ness
  • The trilogy began with The Knife of Never Letting Go about Todd Hewitt who can hear everything other people thinks and vice versa. He finds out that his town has been keeping secrets that will force him to run. In the second book, Todd and wounded Viola runs right into the hands of Mayor Prentiss. Separated and imprisoned, Todd is forced to learn the ways of the Mayor’s new order. Questions remains: What secrets are being hidden? Where is Viola? Who are the Answer? … This is a tense, shocking and deeply moving novel of resistance under the most extreme pressure.

This year’s overall winner of the Costa Book Awards will be announced on 26th January 2010 and the winner stands to walk away with an additional £ 25,000.

On 24th November 2009, Costa, UK’s fastest-growing coffee shop chain, has announced on BBC Radio 4′s Front Row programme, the shortlists for the 2009 Costa Book Awards. The award is one of the most prestigious and popular literary prizes in the UK for and recognises the most enjoyable bookswriters based in the UK and Ireland. The award has 5 sub-categories: five categories: First Novel, Novel, Biography, Poetry and Children’s Book.

The Costa Book Awards started life in 1971 as the Whitbread Literary Awards. From 1985 they were known as the Whitbread Book Awards until 2006, when Costa Coffee took over ownership – the year that both Costa and the Book Awards celebrated their 35th anniversary.

Since 1971, the awards have rewarded a wide range of excellent books and authors across all genres. Since the introduction of the overall Book of the Year Award in 1985, it has been won seven times by a novel, three times by a first novel, five times by a biography, five times by a collection of poetry and once by a children’s book.

The Ask and the Answer by Patrick Ness

Costa First Novel Award

• The Finest Type of English Womanhood by Rachel Heath
• John the Revelator by Peter Murphy
• Beauty by Raphael Selbourne
• The Girl with Glass Feet by Ali Shaw

Costa Novel Award

• Family Album by Penelope Lively
• Wolf Hall by Hilary Mantel
• The Elephant Keeper by Christopher Nicholson
• Brooklyn by Colm Toibin

Costa Biography Award

• The Strangest Man: The Hidden Life of Paul Dirac, Quantum Genius by Graham Farmelo
• The Music Room by William Fiennes
• Coda by Simon Gray
• Dancing to the Precipice by Caroline Moorehead

Costa Poetry Award

• Angels Over Elsinore by Clive James
• One Eye’d Leigh by Katharine Kilalea
• Darwin: A Life in Poems by Ruth Padel
• A Scattering by Christopher Reid

Costa Children’s Award

• Solace of the Road by Siobhan Dowd
• Troubadour by Mary Hoffman
• The Ask and the Answer by Patrick Ness
• Guantanamo Boy by Anna Perera

The winners of all 5 categories will be announced on 5th January 2010 while the overall winner will be announced on 26th January 2010. Last year’s Book of the Year was won by Irish author, Sebastian Barry for his book The Secret Scripture.

(Source: Costa Book Awards)

National Book Foundation

The mission of the National Book Foundation and the National Book Awards is to celebrate the best of American literature, to expand its audience, and to enhance the value of good writing in America. The awards were first given on March 16, 1950 to writers, by writers to honor the year’s best work in fiction, nonfiction, and poetry.

In 1980, various publishers who sponsored the event sought to broaden further the audience for American literature by honoring an even wider range of American writers. As a result, the 30-year-old National Book Awards was discontinued and The American Book Awards (TABA) established. TABA gave a total of 28 prizes in 16 separate categories. Then, it soon became obvious that too many categories diffused the Awards’ original intended impact. By 1984, the Board reduced the number of awards categories to three and, in 1987, reestablished the National Book Awards. Since 1996, independent panels of five writers have chosen the National Book Award Winners in four categories: Fiction, Nonfiction, Poetry, and Young People’s Literature.

This year, 193 publishers submitted 1,129 books for the 2009 National Book Awards. The results were announced on 18 November, 2009.
The winners are as follows:

• Fiction: Let the Great World Spin by Colum McCann
• Non-fiction: The First Tycoon: The Epic Life of Cornelius Vanderbilt by T. J. Stiles
• Poetry: Transcendental Studies: A Trilogy by Keith Waldrop
• Young People’s Literature: Claudette Colvin: Twice Toward Justice by Philip Hoose

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