Cornflower Books

Mood-boosting books

    My thanks to Barbara for the reminder - in her comment the other day - about The Reading Agency's Mood-boosting Books promotion. Aimed at adults, "particularly those who might have experienced mild to moderate mental-health conditions linked to stress, anxiety and depression", the books they suggest as mood boosters can of course be enjoyed by all, regardless of state of mind, and here's the full list of 27.

    Which of those, if any, have you read? I can tick off Cider With Rosie, Hector & the Search for Happiness, Major Pettigrew's Last Stand, the utterly wonderful The Pursuit of Love (though I do not care for that cover!), and A Winter Book, and I enjoyed them all and would recommend them. Of the others, I like the sound of Barbara Kingsolver's Prodigal Summer and Bill Bryson's Notes From A Small Island.

    Any other books you'd class as 'mood-boosting'?

Would you like to win a book?

 

    If you'd like the chance to win some great Scottish books, get in quick - there's a draw about to close. All you have to do to enter is pop over to A Broad Scot and put your name in the hat; you can sign up to a free six month trial of the digital magazine which turns the spotlight on contemporary Scottish culture, both at home and abroad, or you can subscribe for a year at very reasonable cost. It's certainly worth a look.

    There's a good range of books on offer, both fiction and non-fiction (and as if that wasn't enough, I'm there on the website, too). But never mind me, do go and see what the magazine is all about.

Out now in paperback: The Coward's Tale, Vanessa Gebbie

 

    No apologies for repeating a post as The Coward's Tale by Vanessa Gebbie is a fine novel, and as it's newly out in paperback I wanted to put the spotlight on it once more. Here are my thoughts on it from earlier in the year:

    Reading an interview with Vanessa Gebbie one sentence in particular caught my eye. Talking about her novel and the year she spent polishing it, Vanessa says, "It took a long time until I was happy with each sentence". Two things strike met: if only more authors were as assiduous, as meticulous as Vanessa is, and how that care and attention to every word shows in the finished book!

    I wrote a little about the book (and its musical map) in this post and I mentioned that it was a beautifully crafted piece, and it is that, both in terms of the wider arc of the story and of every underlying detail. There's a debt to Dylan Thomas here in the language and the construction, but with a nod to that literary heritage, every line is Vanessa's own; here are a couple to show you what I mean:

"... perfectly matched bedside tables for the Deputy Manager of the Savings Bank and his wife, but their bedroom floor is uneven so both glasses for the false teeth go on one table, where they can smile at each other until morning."

At the bank, "Matty Harris ... will have straightened and straightened his papers that need no straightening at all. He'll have opened and closed the drawers of his desk to hear the small sounds of their importance."

    There is nothing pedestrian about this novel, no phrase that like the feathers carved by the woodwork teacher Icarus Evans has not been worked at and honed until it shines, but that masterly fashioning is matched by an intricate pattern of individual story lines, each one a picture of a character, each one a step further in relating past events and explaining present circumstances. Central to this is the young boy, Laddy Merridew, who has been sent to live with his grandmother in this small Welsh mining community and who finds a friend in Ianto Passchendaele Jenkins, the town beggar and keeper of its stories. As Ianto tells of this person and that one, their tics and foibles, the set of their habits and the deep grooves of their ways, so it seems that everything leads back to a September day many years earlier when an explosion at the Kindly Light pit took many of the town's men.

    In a book based on a central tragic event, there is great humour and humanity, honesty and poignancy - the pitch is just right, and all the while the story's cadences rise and fall with a lilt and a rhythm that make it irresistible. Vanessa's year of polishing has truly paid off; this is an outstanding piece.

 

Edited to add: over on author Claire King's blog there's a super, wide-ranging interview with Vanessa and paperbacks editor Trâm-Anh Doan, and if you've ever wondered about the cover design process and why paperback covers often differ from a book's hardback jacket, all is explained.

A little of what you fancy

 

    It's time to choose the May title for the CBG, and as we've now read 49 books and have our 50th. ready and waiting, I thought I'd ask you all for your suggestions as to where we go next.

    To see what we've already read, look over there at the right hand sidebar and scroll down past the lists of arrivals, bookshops, writers, publishers etc. and you'll find them all in order with the most recent one up at the top. I think it's a pretty good range, given the constraints on choice, i.e. the book has to be available in libraries and shops 'everywhere' - that's a limiting factor, especially where recently published books are concerned because they may well not have filtered through the library systems to the same extent that ones which have been around for a while have done. If you prefer to own your own copy, that's much easier nowadays with the proliferation of e-books, the reach of online retailers, and efficient 'bricks and mortar' booksellers who can order anything (in print) not already on their shelves, but what it all comes down to is trying to choose something which anyone, regardless of their location and preferred method of obtaining the book, can get their hands on.

    Those are the practicalities which have a bearing on our choices, but what about the fun bit: the genres we may like to consider, the individual authors, periods or countries of origin? What takes your fancy? What sort of thing would you like to read with the group? Should we do other books by authors we've already read? Read more in translation? Are you in the mood for more classics (Lady Audley's Secret went down well)? Something very contemporary, perhaps? Please let me know what you think.

Another peal of the bells

 

    There were so many excellent, interesting points in the comments on The Nine Tailors that I thought I'd bring them centre stage and make this a follow-up post of sorts. Some are specific to the novel, others apply across our reading generally, so if you want to further the discussion here, please do so, it's not just for those who contributed to Saturday's post.

Setting and detail:

    Those bells! Some of us found the whole business of the bells and change-ringing absolutely fascinating. Audrey said she "loved the language of the bells - incomprehensible but poetical", Margaret found it "intimidating and indispensable", Julie was bored by that aspect and felt the need to "just to get on with it"! To a lesser extent the Fen country descriptions provoked similar reactions, though of course in both cases, all that scene-setting was crucial to the story. As ever with books, one man's meat is another man's poison: some of us lap up that degree of detail, others feel it hinders plot development and so prefer less of it. As a rule, in which camp would you put yourself?

Vicarious living:

    I think we're all agreed we'd like a Bunter of our own, and Lord Peter's "charmed life", as Ruthiella put it, is an appealing characteristic of these books. Again speaking generally, do you find you're more drawn to books which promise agreeable people in pleasant places, worlds in which - with the benefit of a magic wand - you might quite like to spend time yourself, or are you equally happy to read about less congenial types in grim situations? Your choice may of course depend on what's going on in your own life at any time, e.g. as Ruth says, Dorothy L. Sayers's books are her "go-to re-read in tough times, cozy times, can't sleep times, need something wonderful, wise and well-crafted to get lost in times".

Losing the plot:

    (1) Lots of us commented that we couldn't follow the ins and outs of one major section of the book, and the fact of being lost in that way provided food for thought. Both Sandy and Mr. C. were happy to be carried along and "be absorbed into this world', letting the intricacies wash over them "in an impressionistic way", others felt they wanted to appreciate every twist and turn. This led to Claire's point about reading on a Kindle and how it can be difficult to flip back and forth to specific passages if you need to remind yourself of some detail - the search function is very helpful, but you may not have a good enough search term to use to take you back, while a vague memory of where in the physical book an incident takes place may be sufficient to get you to the scene in question. I haven't encountered this lack of orientation with the Kindle, and I was reading The Nine Tailors in paper form, but I'd like to know if you feel this is a drawback of sorts to e-books generally. (2) Do you feel the need to follow every plot shift in a novel and understand completely what has happened, how, why and when, or like the gentlemen above, are you quite content to sit back and enjoy the ride? (3) Chloe commented, "I remain undecided if a plot so clever 90% of readers can't follow is a good or a bad thing". Very interesting point - what do you think?

The past is another country...:

    Lots of us commented that the book was of its time and that that was part of its attraction for us (though it was a huge success in its own day, too). Ruth said books such as this one are "deliciously old, other, offering entry to another time and place", and I think that puts it very well and explains part of its charm.

Reading on:

    Many thanks to everyone who recommended other Dorothy L. Sayers novels for those of us who are now eager for more. The titles mentioned were Gaudy Night, Strong Poison and Five Red Herrings. Has anyone read any of the Jill Paton Walsh books which feature Lord Peter Wimsey? As I understand it, Thrones, Dominations was begun by DLS and abandoned, and JPW used what material there was and finished the book; she also used the character in A Presumption of Death and The Attenbury Emeralds.

Man reading

    It was warm enough to sit outside today, so Mr. C. climbed up to his den - a tree 'house' in the Scots pine - and read Summer Lightning. That's a picture of contentment.

Cornflower Book Group - The Nine Tailors

 

    The bells, the bells!

    What an ingenious book Dorothy L. Sayers's The Nine Tailors is; how well researched and cleverly plotted, and what great, dramatic, entertainment it makes.

    As my first Sayers novel it was a superb introduction to the engaging Lord Peter Wimsey (gourmet, campanologist, all round superhero ...) and his faithful and resourceful manservant Bunter. The ordered, hierarchical society in which it is set provides the perfect framework on which to hang a plot such as this one, and so we have a charming absent-minded rector, some 'rude mechanicals', a landed family fallen on hard times, and for action, sundry deaths and an unexpected corpse, a jewel theft, bigamy, and all amidst the most marvellously realised East Anglian Fen country setting above which the church of Fenchurch St. Paul rises, literally and metaphorically, as the focus and centre of everything, playing - as we see - a major part in more ways than one.

    I'll admit I got lost in the business of who was who and who did what and when when it came to Cranton, Thoday, Deacon, etc., but I'm sure that's down to my lack of close attention. Inevitably, given the book's age, there were some quite harsh stereotypical remarks which wouldn't figure - in the authorial voice, at least - in a similar novel today ("the mulish obstinacy of the French peasant" was one such I had in mind).

    I was enthralled by all the information about the bells and change ringing and the intricacies of the church's architecture - context is everything in a book like this, and DLS knows how to use it to best advantage. Interesting too that she allows the plot to unfold relatively slowly (the story taking place over the span of a year) and in so doing she gives herself scope for practical development and 'atmospheric enrichment'.

    "Authorship is a good stick but a bad crutch," says Edward Thorpe, Hilary's uncle. Is that Miss Sayers speaking from experience or is that purely her character's opinion. Whichever it is, a book like this shows that she herself could stand firmly on her own two feet, though of course knowing her reputation, that was never in doubt.

    A real treat, then, for me; what did you think of it?

Later: 'Books and cakes' for The Nine Tailors is here.

Where's your reading taking you?

 

    Where's your reading taking you at the moment?

    I'm currently in Malaya in 1941 where the privileged life of rubber plantation owners is about to be disrupted by war, and I'm there via the pages of The White Pearl by Kate Furnivall. I've still a long way to go, but it's one of those stories which sweep the reader along, and as danger approaches I'm keen to find out what will happen to the heroine Connie Hadley and her family.

   

    When I leave war-torn Malaya I shall be off to Victorian London with Little Bones by Janette Jenkins: "a young girl is abandoned by her feckless family and finds lodging and work assisting a doctor. But Jane Stretch is no ordinary girl, and Mr. Swift is no ordinary doctor ..." I'm looking forward to that one!

 

    

    After that I'll be in the north of England in the 1930s with Susan Hill's A Kind Man - a "tidy volume", and a moving story by the look of it, and Susan Hill is always a pleasure.

 

    That's my varied lot for the moment; how about you? To what time and place is your reading taking you?

The Admirable Crichton

    A literary link from my visit to St. Andrews today. I hope you can read the inscription clearly (it's on a house in North Street); it seems J.M. Barrie took only the young man's name for his play (I remember seeing the film starring Kenneth More ages ago), but what accomplishments the real fellow had. Admirable indeed.

The Music Room

 

    Sometimes the most special books are the hardest ones to write about, and after three false starts it was looking as though this post would end up a brief one if it made it to published status at all: identifying fine writing is much easier than analysing it. However, just saying 'read this book' won't do, so let me try to explain why I think it is worth seeking out.

    I've no idea what possessed me to pick up a copy of William Fiennes' The Snow Geese in a bookshop a few years ago - as someone who doesn't care much for birds, this account of the author's travels on the migration routes of the snow geese through North America would not be typical reading, but the impulse probably had to do with the cover quote: "A beautifully quiet, beautifully solitary and beautifully reflective book". It is all that, and avians nothwithstanding, I loved it.

    So keen was I to read William Fiennes' second book, The Music Room, that after snapping it up I stowed it in my bag on a flight to London for a day at Wimbledon. I should have known that that sort of frenetic environment was not the place to take in something 'quiet, solitary and reflective', so it was put aside then and only now picked up again, but at last I've read it and it is all I'd hoped.

    It is a memoir of a family and their home, but it's also a book about childhood and growing up, about parents' instincts to nurture and protect their offspring, about the accommodations - both small and subtle and large and distinct - which all families make when there is imbalance somewhere and when one of their number needs more care than most. It's the story of the Fiennes' home Broughton Castle, a fortified manor house, medieval and moated, and of William's elder brother Rich, a young man whose life itself was "moated in" - dominated and directed by his epilepsy - and it's about a sibling's place in a family whose heritage is all around them and whose personal history is marked by loss as well as love.

    Fiennes is such an observant, sensitive narrator. He is, here, the custodian of so many memories, and it is the texture of those remembered times, the layered details which shape and colour a moment, which his gift for language brings out. Lucid, restrained, accepting, tender - that's the mood of the piece, and it gives much to savour. If you're drawn to contemplative writing and to understated poignancy, then this essentially sad but ultimately uplifting book should touch and impress you, and will undoubtedly make you think.

Mary on Waterstones

 

    In case you haven't seen it, here's Mary Portas's review of the Waterstones branch in London's Gower Street. I'd love to see what Mary would do if she did get her hands on a bookshop - note her offer at the end of the piece!

Bargain of the day - Can any mother help me?

 

    I've just spotted that today's 'Kindle Daily Deal' is Can Any Mother Help Me? by Jenna Bailey. I read it on publication five years ago and loved it, so I'd urge you to snap it up for today's bargain price of £0.99 if you're at all interested in the social history of the 20th. century and particularly women's lives and the domestic front. Here's what I wrote about it back in 2007:

In 1935 a young woman wrote a letter to the magazine "Nursery World": "Can any mother help me? I live a very lonely life ...... I adore reading, but with no library am very limited with books.... Can any reader suggest an occupation that will intrigue me and exclude 'thinking' and cost nothing!" This plea struck a chord with women around the country who wrote back expressing their own, similar frustrations; the result was a private magazine.

Now Jenna Bailey has discovered the amazing archive that is the work of the Co-operative Correspondence Club or CCC, as the magazine was called.

For almost fifty years, members  - who adopted pseudonyms - circulated articles, all edited and bound in hand-embroidered linen covers by the indefatigable and meticulous 'Ad Astra'. Subject matter concentrated on what concerned them most personally, so the result is a hugely valuable social history of women's domestic lives from the 1930s on, now made public for the first time in Jenna's book Can Any Mother Help Me?

This was a truly affecting read. I found myself involved from the start with the women's individual stories, sharing their joys and sorrows, amazed at their courage in immensely difficult times, surprised at their candour, particularly where marriage was the issue, and cheered by the very supportive nature of the whole enterprise.

Had the technology existed, these women would have been the bloggers of their day. They left comments on one another's articles, private friendships beyond the confines of the paper 'club' developed, and practical help was often given in addition to sound advice. They were articulate, generally highly educated, often seeking an outlet which their lives as wives and mothers could not provide, but which their mutual correspondence apparently could.

One member, 'Accidia', makes the point: "Relieved of the inevitability of sink and duster and oven, one could be so much more creative in one's relationship with other people", and this seems to set the tone for what was written over the years. The result is an impressive testament to the way the women 'just got on' with things, expressing themselves - albeit safely  - within the group, but bringing an acute sense of perspective to often trying circumstances.

At the end of her life and in poor health, 'Ad Astra' decided the CCC papers she had kept over the years had become a burden to her and resolved to burn them. Fortunately, she told another member, 'Elektra', of her plan, and Elektra intervened and rescued the articles, later donating them to the Mass Observation Archive at the University of Sussex, which is where Jenna Bailey found them.  Elektra is now 101, and still going strong. Thank goodness she stepped in, and thank goodness she and her fellow members took the trouble to put pen to paper so often and for so long; the result is remarkable.

A question for you

   Let's tap into the vast knowledge of the Cornflower readership again:

Rebecca has been in touch as she's looking for information about Eve Garnett (writer and illustrator of The Family from One End Street ), specifically whether she is connected to David Garnett of the Bloomsbury group (author of Lady into Fox), and his grandfather who Rebecca says was something important at the British Museum.

    Does anyone know?

Misc.: books, blogs, writing and reading

 

 In her comment on yesterday's post, Liz F mentioned Alan Garner; for anyone not already aware of this, his next novel Boneland - the conclusion to the story which began with The Weirdstone of Brisingamen - is to be published in late August. There's more on it here.

 

    Frank Delaney, whose latest novel The Last Storyteller is just out, has given hearty endorsement to the book blogging community in this interview: "The Literary Bloggers have no axes to grind, they're not protecting their reputations, they don't fear being sneered at by other critics, they're reading what they want to read, writing what they want to write, and they don't want to keep what they enjoy to themselves. They want to share. They want to expand the constituency of reading. They want to hail and applaud good writing. To my mind this is a very significant development – uneven, I grant, here and there, but, dammit, not as uneven as the generations of formal literary critics, and the blogging intention is so good and so worthy of loud vocal support that you can call it truly a new and, to my mind, incomparably welcome development in the world of reading and writing."  Well said, Frank!

 

    On the writing side, budding young writers of historical fiction may like to enter the Chalke Valley History Prize which was launched in London yesterday. Click here for all the details including age groups, rules and prizes.

 

    And finally, another snippet from The Pleasure of Reading, this time the poet Wendy Cope on a classic: "Molesworth is another touchstone. Nobody who fails to respond to his wit can really be on my wavelength. I first came across Down With Skool! when I was eleven. 'It looks like a boys' book,' said my mother. 'Are you sure you want it?'. Though it was Ronald Searle's illustrations that caught my eye in the bookshop, the text, by Geoffrey Willans, proved just as wonderful. Nowadays I like the literary theory best: 'Poetry is sissy stuff that rhymes. Weedy people say la and fie and swoon when they see a bunch of daffodils.'"

Tol-keen

 

 

    I was browsing the other evening at Juxtabook's online shop C.L. Hawley Books when I spotted and quickly snapped up The Pleasure of Reading, edited by Antonia Fraser, a collection of pieces by forty authors revealing their reading, literary loves and favourite books from childhood onwards. Each essay is accompanied by specially commissioned illustrations (forty illustrators!), and with a range of contributors from Catherine Cookson to Janette Winterson, Tom Stoppard to Roger McGough, there's a wealth of material here for dipping into in an idle hour.

  

    Reading A.S. Byatt's contribution just now, I saw that she lists Tolkien's The Lord of The Rings among her favourites "for reading when very ill or depressed: it is compelling narrative and there is no sex and no real moral problems to agitate the mind". In the body of her piece she says,

    "I agree wholly with Tolkien and Auden in their dispute with Alan Garner about how to write about magical and alien worlds for children. The little groups of wandering Susans and Johns and Erics in their pyjamas and school sandals ruined many good imaginary landscapes and cosmic battles for me. I am too old to have read Tolkien as a child, but the child in me read and reads him as an adult in moments of depression, as I read Dumas and Asgard and the Gods [and see also Ragnarok, of course], to live in narrative."

 

    I wondered who else among the authors was keen on Tolkien, and I found this by Ruth Rendell:

    "Two years after The Hobbit was published I read it for the first time. Twenty years later I read it again and experienced just the same feeling of delight and happiness and a quite breathless pleasure. That first time, when I was nine, was also the first time I remember feeling this. It is a sensation known to all lovers of fiction and comes at about page two, when you know it's not only going to be good, but immensely satisfying, enthralling, not to be put down without resentment, drawing inexorably to a conclusion of power and dramatic soundness." [Lovely!]

 

    Then I came to Alan Hollinghurst -

"Tolkien, of course, was a laboriously unamusing and I now think bad writer; but he was my obsession between the ages of twelve and fourteen. I took a poor view of The Hobbit but read The Lord of the Rings six times in successsion ... I remain aware of the deep feelings it nurtured in me - feelings about place in particular. All its most potent and plausible geography is English, and it conspired with the places where I had grown up ... to charge all those landscapes with a heroic, elegiac air. Doubtless I could have got this from other writers too; but as it happened I got it from the derivative fustian of Tolkien, and I feel it keenly still."    

    Solace, delight and depth of feeling, the authors I've quoted got much from Tolkien. Were you one of those who read his work voraciously as a youngster, and if so, have you gone back to him in adult life? My answer would be 'yes' and 'no' - though maybe I should revisit him - how about you?

The Beginner's Goodbye

 

 

    "The strangest thing about my wife's return from the dead was how other people reacted."

    As opening lines go, that one - from The Beginner's Goodbye by Anne Tyler - is nothing if not strong, but what follows it is not a sensational story by any means, just a beautifully low key, understated novel about love and marriage and their ups and downs.

    Aaron Woolcott works at his family's publishing firm producing in the main "The Beginner's Guides" to everything under the sun, books for which he makes no great claims, calling them "gestures ... a set of instruction manuals whose stated goal was to skim the surface". When he meets Dr. Dorothy Rosales to seek expert help with "The Beginner's Cancer", he finds her stubborn and prickly and unbending, but despite a degree of incompatibility, love blossoms.

    Some years into their marriage, a freak accident at home takes Dorothy's life. Aaron slowly adjusts to his new existence, and then Dorothy starts appearing here and there for short whiles and longer stays. Aaron doesn't question this sudden materialisation, thinking perhaps that Dorothy has returned to tell him something, sensing that once she has done that she will leave again - a moment he feels he would be unable to bear. So he avoids the whys and wherefores but takes comfort from just being with her, and the two begin to talk ... and then to bicker. Their marriage had been "out of sync. Uncoordinated. It seemed we just never quite got the hang of being a couple the way other people did," and the death of one partner clearly hasn't changed that.

    This is a bittersweet book (see also Breathing Lessons), full of Anne Tyler's sharp but subtle observation and warm humour. She is a marvellous chronicler of everyday life, and adept at portraying the man or woman in the street as an ordinary person, not a stagey 'character'. Her people are human, their predicaments real, and she writes with affection, understanding and a natural fluency which makes the book a great pleasure to read.

    Anne Tyler will be appearing at the Oxford Literary Festival on Sunday, 1st. April, talking about the book and receiving The Sunday Times Award for Literary Excellence; I should think she will be very much worth hearing.

A writer's research

 

    "[Dorothy L. Sayers's] notebooks show the intensive work she devoted to the question of bell-ringing. Sixty-three pages exist, containing detailed notes on bells, bell-cages, bell-inscriptions and the care of bells; forty of them are sheets of changes, on which she spent innumerable hours until she could do any method accurately in her head. Her understanding of this difficult subject was entirely theoretical - she had never pulled a rope in her life. She visualised and felt through her imagination what it was like to handle a bell and what it meant to have 'rope-sight'. In the end, she wrote, 'the experts could discern only (I think) three small technical errors which betrayed the lack of practical experience'. This made her, she confessed, 'sinfully proud'.

    "She had every reason to be proud. The Campanological Society of Great Britain invited her to become their vice-president. The Oxford Companion to Music refers the reader to The Nine Tailors for a lucid explanation of change-ringing. The book has been praised as 'one of the finest examples of a mystery story incorporating specialised knowledge'."

    From Dorothy L.Sayers: Her Life and Soul by Barbara Reynolds.

    If you've read The Nine Tailors or are reading it with our group, you'll appreciate the significance of the subject of bells and their ringing to the book. I don't want to pre-empt our discussion (we'll begin that on 24th. March, so there's still time to join in) but having read the novel now, I'm not at all surprised by the passage I've quoted above - the attention to detail throughout that cracking book is mightily impressive!

Edited to add: but now look at this!! - (scroll down to the third paragraph from the end).

Open Book

 

    A quick word about this afternoon's edition of Open Book on Radio 4 at 4pm: it features Bloomsbury's Editor-in-chief Alexandra Pringle talking about their new imprint Bloomsbury Circus (which I flagged up recently),

 

 

and Guy Fraser-Sampson discussing his latest novel Lucia on Holiday (which, in timely fashion, the postie brought yesterday), an item all Luciaphiles will want to hear, I'm sure. I shall be listening!

 

(The programme will be broadcast again on Thursday at 3.30pm, and will no doubt be available on iPlayer).

Birth of a book

    A lovely short film showing the making of one of Slightly Foxed's limited editions - clothbound pocket hardbacks. The article from which it is taken is here.

The love for four oranges

 

    Delighted to see four of my favourite books from last year on the 20 strong Orange Prize longlist:

 

    Gillespie and I by Jane Harris (post on it here)

    The Translation of the Bones by Francesca Kay (post here)

    State of Wonder by Ann Patchett (thoughts here)

    The Song of Achilles by Madeline Miller (post on it here)

    I'm particularly thrilled for Madeline as that is her debut novel, but all four are splendid books. The shortlist is to come in April and the winner will be announced at the end of May.