
The Walter Scott Prize for Historical Fiction longlist has been announced today:
The Clocks In This House All Tell Different Times by Xan Brooks; a dark social-realist fairytale, spotlighting the shadowy underside of 1920s England.
Birdcage Walk by Helen Dunmore; it is 1792 and Europe is seized by political turmoil and violence.
Manhattan Beach by Jennifer Egan; the long-awaited novel from the Pulitzer Prize-winning author opens in Brooklyn during the Great Depression.
The Last Man In Europe by Dennis Glover; April, 1947. In a run-down farmhouse on a remote Scottish island, George Orwell begins his last and greatest work: Nineteen Eighty-Four.
Sugar Money by Jane Harris; a tale of slavery and freedom, innocence and experience, love and despair set in the 18th century Caribbean.
Prussian Blue by Philip Kerr; France, 1956. Bernie Gunther is on the run. The twelfth book in the renowned series.
The Draughtsman by Robert Lautner; 1944, Germany. A novel which shines a light on the complex contradictions of human nature and examines how deeply complicit we can become in the face of fear.
Grace by Paul Lynch; an epic coming-of-age novel and a poetic evocation of the Irish famine as it has never been written.
The Wardrobe Mistress by Patrick McGrath; a portrait of a woman struggling to make sense of her past and imagine a future in the seedy glamour of London’s theatrical world in 1947.
Miss Boston and Miss Hargreaves by Rachel Malik; 1940s rural England sets the scene for a multi-layered tale of an unlikely friendship.
The Gallows Pole by Benjamin Myers; C18th. Yorkshire. A gang of weavers and land workers embark upon a criminal enterprise that will capsize the economy and become the biggest fraud in British history.
The Horseman by Tim Pears; an unexpected friendship between two children, set in Devon in 1911.
The Bedlam Stacks by Natasha Pulley; set in the magical forests of South America in 1859.
If you've read any of these do let us know your thoughts. I can speak only of Tim Pears's The Horseman, one of my top favourite novels of last year.