Cornflower Books

Biographical details

    The shortlist for the Slightly Foxed Best First Biography Prize has been announced today (judges' comments follow each book):

    David Jones, Engraver, Soldier, Painter, Poet by Thomas Dilworth

       This comprehensive life of the great Modernist poet-artist David Jones is the fruit of a lifetime’s research and understanding, and brings new light to shine on Jones’s rare originality and genius.

    The Invention of Angela Carter: A Biography by Edmund Gordon

        In this finely judged and elegantly written biography, Gordon teases out the truth behind Angela Carter’s fictions about her own life, while recounting the brilliant and volatile career of this born writer, critic and fabulist.         

    This is Going to Hurt: Secret Diaries of a Junior Doctor by Adam Kay

        A best-selling, no-holds-barred account of life at the coalface of the NHS by a comedian and former doctor, hilarious, horrifying and heartbreaking by turns.

    Young, Damned and Fair: The Life and Tragedy of Catherine Howard by Gareth Russell

        A stunning reappraisal of Henry VIII’s fifth wife, as scholarly as it is readable, that uses extensive research into her household to bring her chequered story vividly to life.

    The Uncommon Reader: A Life of Edward Garnett by Helen Smith

        An exemplary life of the writer and editor with a gift for spotting genius, champion of Conrad, Galsworthy, D.H. and T.E. Lawrence and Somerset Maugham, literary godfather to the Edwardian age.

    Kenneth Clark: Life, Art and Civilisation by James Stourton

        As a new version of Civilisation comes to our screens, the complex figure of Kenneth Clark, aesthete, broadcaster, writer and cultural panjandrum, is dissected in this perceptive and entertaining biography. 

    The winner will be announced on 6th. March.

Waterstones Book of the Year

    I've had little more than a passing interest in book prizes this year as my reading has seen me mostly in meandering literary backwaters rather than the fast-moving mainstream, but nevertheless I am sufficiently au courant to be very pleased that Waterstones have chosen La Belle Sauvage as their book of the year.

This and that

    -    Here's news of a lovely literary prize.

    -    Minette Walters has a major historical novel coming out in the autumn.

    -    Donna Leon's been on Meet the Writers. (Mr. C. recently read her last but one Brunetti book and speaks very highly of it.)

    -    The Walter Scott Prize is turning the spotlight on its shortlisted authors in a series of interviews beginning with Jo Baker.

    -    In this post, Adèle tells us where she gets (some of) her ideas.

The Walter Scott Prize for Historical Fiction: the longlist

   

    The longlist for the Walter Scott Prize for Historical Fiction 2017 was released earlier today, and here it is:

 

A Country Road, A Tree by Jo Baker

The Noise of Time by Julian Barnes

Days Without End by Sebastian Barry

Crane Pond by Richard Francis

The Dark Circle by Linda Grant

The Vanishing Futurist by Charlotte Hobson

The Good People by Hannah Kent

Minds of Winter by Ed O'Loughlin

The Essex Serpent by Sarah Perry

The Last Painting of Sara de Vos by Dominic Smith

Golden Hill by Francis Spufford

Mothering Sunday by Graham Swift

The Gustav Sonata by Rose Tremain

    The shortlist will follow in April and the winner will be announced in June, but in the meantime to broaden the reach of the prize the Walter Scott Prize Academy have published a list of a further 20 novels from this year's entries which they recommend; you can find it here.

The Walter Scott Prize for Historical Fiction: the winner

    If you've been following the longlist and shortlist for The Walter Scott Prize for Historical Fiction you may like to know that the winner, announced last night, is Simon Mawer for Tightrope.

    Tightrope follows Marian Sutro, who has survived Ravensbruck and is back in dreary London trying to pick up the pieces of her post-War life. It is Simon Mawer’s tenth novel; his seventh, The Glass Room (which many of us read in 2012), was shortlisted for the Walter Scott Prize in 2010.

The Judges said:
    ‘Tightrope is a spy story in the grand tradition, sweeping the reader irresistibly into the harrowing life of a secret agent in World War Two. Impeccably researched, it perfectly inhabits its time and place. It is a worthy winner of the Walter Scott Prize for Historical Fiction.

    Marian Sutro, who made her first appearance in The Girl Who Fell from the Sky, is a commanding character, enigmatic and fascinating. Damaged by her experiences, by the dangers she has faced, by those who have betrayed her and those she has been forced to betray, Sutro walks the tightrope between the people in her life who have sent her into danger, those whom she must fear, and those she seeks to protect.

    Tightrope, however, is more than a very good spy thriller. We are used now, in a century already scarred by wars, to the concept of post traumatic stress disorder. There was no such diagnosis in the aftermath of the twentieth century's terrible wars, but it afflicted millions, nevertheless. Simon Mawer has given us, in the character of Marian Sutro, a study of how the terrifying events she endured in her youth shaped and transformed the rest of her life.'

Spirit of place

    I'm always very glad to see a book I've loved get the recognition that comes with a literary prize listing or win, and today it's kudos to James Rebanks in the form of a shortlisting for his The Shepherd's Life: A Tale of the Lake District for the Royal Society of Literature Ondaatje Prize. That award celebrates a work of fiction, non-fiction or poetry which "best evokes the spirit of a place", and James Rebanks' book certainly does that and more besides (there's a short post on it here).

    Also shortlisted are The River by Jane Clarke, The Great Explosion: Gunpowder, the Great War, and a Disaster on the Kent Marshes by Brian Dillon, Weatherland: Writers & Artists Under English Skies by Alexandra Harris, Nothing is True and Everything is Possible: Adventures in Modern Russia, and This Divided Island: Stories from the Sri Lankan War by Samanth Subramanian.

    The winner will be announced on 23rd. May.

The Walter Scott Prize for Historical Fiction: the shortlist

    Last month, the longlist for The Walter Scott Prize for Historical Fiction was announced, and that's now been whittled down to reveal the shortlist:

Sweet Caress: The Many Lives of Amory Clay by William Boyd

A Place Called Winter by Patrick Gale

Mrs Engels by Gavin McCrea

End Games in Bordeaux* by Allan Massie

Tightrope by Simon Mawer

Salt Creek by Lucy Treloar

 

    The shortlisted authors have been invited to take part in a panel discussion on historical fiction at The Borders Book Festival in Melrose on Saturday, 18th, June, and the winner will be announced that day.

 

*See this post.

Knife, fork, and pen

    A wee reminder there of The Mogford Food & Drink Short Story Prize deadline. It so happens that I was staying in one of Jeremy Mogford's hotels over the weekend, and the prize stories from previous years were all arranged by the bed and displayed in a prominent position in the hotel's library.

    A quick word on this year's judges. As you'll see from the above they include Rick Stein, who is not only a very well known chef and food writer but is shortly to open his own bookshop in Padstow, and Lawrence Norfolk, author of (among others) this wonderful, wonderful book.

The Walter Scott Prize for Historical Fiction: the longlist

    The Walter Scott Prize for Historical Fiction is one in which many of us take a keen interest; here's this year's longlist:

A God in Ruins by Kate Atkinson

Sweet Caress: The Many Lives of Amory Clay by William Boyd

A Petrol Scented Spring by Ajay Close

A Place Called Winter by Patrick Gale

Dictator by Robert Harris

Devastation Road by Jason Hewitt

Death and Mr Pickwick by Stephen Jarvis

Mrs Engels by Gavin McCrea

End Games in Bordeaux by Allan Massie

Tightrope by Simon Mawer

Signs for Lost Children by Sarah Moss

Curtain Call by Anthony Quinn

Salt Creek by Lucy Treloar

    The shortlist will be announced at the end of March, and the winner at The Borders Book Festival on 18th. June.

Costa Book of the Year

   

    We had the category winners earlier in the month, and yesterday Frances Hardinge's The Lie Tree was announced Costa Book of the Year.

    It's the first children's book to win in more than a decade, but the judges said "we all loved this dark, sprawling, fiercely clever novel that blends history and fantasy in a way that will grip readers of all ages".

    It sounds very interesting indeed - as you'll see if you pop over to the author's website, and watch a short interview with her here.

 

    Edited to add: a quote from this article by Philip Womack -

"The Lie Tree is a substantial text that is complex and intelligent: a lustrous, delicious romp about evolution and feminism, which contains a Hamlet-esque revenge plot. Crucially, [...] it comes from a place of wonder. Regardless of the age of the reader, our whole literary system is predicated on wonder, a fact that is often neglected [...]"

Costa category winners

    The Costa Book Awards category winners are as follows:

First Novel - The Loney by Andrew Michael Hurley

Novel - A God in Ruins by Kate Atkinson

Biography - The Invention of Nature: The Adventures of Alexander von Humboldt, the Lost Hero of Science by Andrea Wulf

Poetry - 40 Sonnets by Don Paterson

Children's - The Lie Tree by Frances Hardinge

    The overall winner will be announced on 26th. January.

Here and there, this and that

    Everyone's talking about the Sainsbury's Christmas advert (and the 'making of' video) just now, Mog toys are flying off the shelves and the book is topping the bestseller list - great news for Save the Children to whom the profits go.

    Judith Kerr, still going strong at 92, is surely a role-model for us all; in case you didn't see it, here's my report of her appearance at last year's Edinburgh International Book Festival where she took the stage with her son Matthew Kneale to explore creative heritage.

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    Not book-related but still on the subject of ageing well, this excellent gentleman has become Mr. C's hero, while this video neatly links cats and skiing!

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    Back to books now, and in other news, the Costa Book Awards shortlists have been announced, and I'm pleased to see Melissa Harrison's At Hawthorn Time in the novel category. It's a story of contemporary rural life set over a spring month, but it's an original and unsettling piece, beautifully done, and it deserves its place on the list.

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    A Clerk of Oxford has posted a typically thoughtful and thought-provoking piece, stemming from St. Hilda, abbess of Whitby. I've had the novel Hild by Nicola Griffith on my wish list for some time, and I was wondering if anyone had read it. Here's an interview with the author.

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    Lastly today, as a PLR Twitter advocate I'm reminding UK writers to ensure that ALL your books are registered at www.plr.uk.com. Paperbacks and audiobooks - anything with a different ISBN - should be listed along with hardbacks so that they qualify for payment under the PLR scheme. Illustrators and translators should check, too. If you have writer friends, please nudge them to make sure their registration is up to date.

The Man Booker Prize 2015 - the longlist

Bill Clegg (US) - Did You Ever Have a Family            

Anne Enright (Ireland) - The Green Road

Marlon James (Jamaica) - A Brief History of Seven Killings

Laila Lalami (US) - The Moor's Account

Tom McCarthy (UK) - Satin Island

Chigozie Obioma (Nigeria) - The Fishermen

Andrew O’Hagan (UK) - The Illuminations

Marilynne Robinson (US) - Lila      

Anuradha Roy (India) - Sleeping on Jupiter

Sunjeev Sahota (UK) - The Year of the Runaways

Anna Smaill (New Zealand) - The Chimes

Anne Tyler (US) - A Spool of Blue Thread

Hanya Yanagihara (US) - A Little Life

    156 books were considered by the judges, 13 make the longlist, and they will be whittled down to six for the shortlist which will be announced on 15th. September.

The Walter Scott Prize for Historical Fiction: the winner

    We've had the longlist, the shortlist, and now this evening, the winner of The Walter Scott Prize for Historical Fiction: John Spurling for Ten Thousand Things.

    "Set in 14th-century China, during the final years of the Mongol-ruled Yuan Dynasty, it is the story of Wang Meng, one of the era’s four great masters of painting. It is John Spurling’s fourth novel [...], took him 15 years to write and was rejected 44 times before being published by Duckworth last year."

    The judges said of the book, “The Ten Thousand Things is subtle and rewarding. Through John Spurling’s writing you feel as though you are reading Wang Meng’s paintings as he created them.  It is a mesmerising, elegantly drawn picture of old imperial China, which feels remarkably modern."

Bargain of the day - The Song of Achilles

   

     One of today's bargains for Kindle is The Song of Achilles by Madeline Miller. It's a book which was a top favourite of mine in 2011, when it came out, and it went on to win the (then) Orange Prize for Fiction the following year. Below is my original piece on the novel, and here you'll find a post about my get-together with Madeline herself.

    If every first novel I read were as accomplished as this one is, it would say much for the future of publishing. The Song of Achilles is by Madeline Miller, a classicist who is also trained in drama, particularly in the adaptation of classical tales for a modern audience, and her background shows in her writing. Here is someone with a complete grasp of her material, but crucially that's teamed with the ability to present it in such a way that the reader is held in awe and admiration. It's a book of clean lines, spaciousness, an airy quality which forms a compelling contrast to the strong characters and dramatic events it portrays. This deft pairing of subject and craftsmanship is enormously impressive, and makes the book stand out as something original and fresh and beautiful (you won't be surprised to hear it's on my 'best of the year' list).     It's the story of Patroclus, exiled to Phthia and the court of King Peleus and his son Achilles. This awkward boy is befriended by Achilles and they become steadfast, constant companions, sent to the mountain home of the centaur Chiron to be tutored in the arts of war and medicine. When Helen of Sparta is abducted by Paris, son of Priam of Troy, the warriors of Greece are called upon to lay siege to Troy, and the two young men leave their peaceful life to take up arms. While Achilles has been trained for the battlefield, it's as a healer that Patroclus comes into his own, the long years of war set to test them both and reveal their fates.

    A tender love story, a book not without humour, a moving re-telling of an archetypal tale, there is a scene in which Achilles' mother, the cruel, possessive sea goddess Thetis, appears to Patroclus in the early morning on the mountain Pelion: "The strangeness began as a prickling of my skin. First the quail went silent, then the dove. The leaves stilled, and the breeze died, and no animals moved in the brush. There was a quality to the silence like a held breath. Like the rabbit beneath the hawk's shadow ..."; the book itself has that feeling of stillness, imminence, foreboding. If this were a painting it would be an expanse of calm white grounding areas of intense, vivid colour, its simplicity drawing the eye, the skill of its making a magnetic charge; as a book, it's one that cannot be put down, its imaginative power lingering long.

The Walter Scott Prize for Historical Fiction: the shortlist

    The shortlist for this year's Walter Scott Prize for Historical Fiction has just been announced, and here it is:

The Zone of Interest by Martin Amis
The Lie by Helen Dunmore
Viper Wine by Hermione Eyre
In the Wolf's Mouth by Adam Foulds
Arctic Summer by Damon Galgut
A God in Every Stone by Kamila Shamsie
The Ten Thousand Things by John Spurling

    Chair of Judges Alistair Moffat said of the list, "[these] seven fantastic novels represent the diversity and breadth of style that the genre of historical fiction now encompasses – from the poetic to the experimental, and from satire to adventure, writing set in the past can challenge, excite and innovate in a hundred different ways."

    It's worth noting also that the judging criteria include "originality and innovation, quality of writing, and a strong narrative," and for the purposes of the Prize, "‘historical’ means that the majority of the events described in the books must have taken place at least 60 years before publication. This definition comes from the subtitle of Sir Walter Scott’s novel Waverley;  Or, ’Tis Sixty Years Since". So now we know!

    Click here to see which of the longlisted books didn't make the cut.

Monday miscellany

    -    In relation to our forthcoming book group reading/discussion of Jane Eyre, many of us wondered how we would respond to the book now, coming back to it later in life, having first read it in our teens. The almost inevitable change in perspective we will bring to it is very interesting for many reasons, not least as Diane Setterfield says, "To reread is not only to circle back in time to a book, but to rediscover yourself and measure the distance – and the closeness – between who you are and who you used to be".

    -    The Romantic Novel of the Year Award has gone to Joss Stirling for her Young Adult novel Struck. It's the first time a YA book has triumphed, but regardless of genre, a prize is no surprise when you realise that Joss Stirling is actually Julia Golding who is very good both on the page and in person, as you'll see here.

    -    On the subject of literary prizes, I intended to write about The Slightly Foxed Best First Biography Prize when it was awarded back in November and somehow the post never materialised, but the book which won sounds as though it would be of interest to many of us, so better late than never ... Those Wild Wyndhams: Three Sisters at the Heart of Power by Claudia Renton, was commended by Lucy Hughes-Hallett, biographer herself and one of the judges for the prize: "Mary, Madeline and Pamela Wyndham’s connections – familial, sexual and social – place them at the heart of a Britain which was brought to an end by the First World War. Through their love affairs and marriages, their house-parties and their patronage, the three sisters dominated a milieu where high society, high finance, politics and the arts were interconnected. Biography has been called the “higher gossip” – this book, ingeniously structured and written with fluency and wit, demonstrates how enjoyable, and how historically illuminating, high gossip can be."

Prizes, prizes

    In talking about the Walter Scott Prize for Historical Fiction the other day I said I was sorry not to see Bodies of Light by Sarah Moss on the longlist. Honour has been restored somewhat by the novel's inclusion on the Wellcome Book Prize shortlist, and if you follow that link and watch the short video you will hear chair of judges Bill Bryson remark that "it's the quality of the writing that really sets this book apart".

    Anyone who has read Bodies of Light will be glad to know that its 'sequel', Signs for Lost Children, will be out in early July.

 

    In other literary prize news, the Bailey's Prize longlist includes the superbly written The Offering by Grace McCleen. I described this as "a beautifully crafted, fluent work of intensity ... a bleak novel but one of great integrity", and while at times it's harrowing reading, the author's talent is undeniable.

    Also on the Bailey's list but towards the lighter end of the emotional spectrum is Anne Tyler's A Spool of Blue Thread, a large-scale 'portrait' on a small-scale canvas. I was about to say that Anne Tyler is the consummate prose pointilliste, but I see that Susan Hill got there before me!

The Walter Scott Prize for Historical Fiction: the longlist

    The judges of this year's Walter Scott Prize for Historical Fiction have announced their longlist today. They have put forward 15 books instead of the usual 12, reflecting the overall strength of writing in the field, and they have made public their choices at this stage - normally only the 6 shortlisted books are named, later in the year - as chairman Alistair Moffat says, in order to "help point readers to some of the very best historical fiction published in [2014].”

    The novels in contention for the prize, to be awarded at the Borders Book Festival on 13th June, are:

The Zone of Interest by Martin Amis
The Temporary Gentleman by Sebastian Barry
The Miniaturist by Jessie Burton
The Lie by Helen Dunmore
Viper Wine by Hermione Eyre
In the Wolf's Mouth by Adam Foulds
Mr Mac and Me by Esther Freud
Arctic Summer by Damon Galgut
Wake by Anna Hope
The Wake by Paul Kingsnorth
The Undertaking by Audrey Magee
A God in Every Stone by Kamila Shamsie
The Architect's Apprentice by Elif Shafak
The Ten Thousand Things by John Spurling
The Paying Guests by Sarah Waters

    I've read only two of the books, The Miniaturist and Mr. Mac and Me, and I'd recommend them both, despite having quibbles with the former, but I'm sorry not to see Bodies of Light by Sarah Moss on the list. Any thoughts on the fifteen, or any book you think should have been among them?

The Man Booker Prize 2014: the shortlist

        

    On the shortlist for this year's Man Booker Prize are:

    To Rise Again at a Decent Hour by Joshua Ferris

    The Narrow Road to the Deep North by Richard Flanagan

We Are All Completely Beside Ourselves by Karen Joy Fowler

J by Howard Jacobson

The Lives of Others by Neel Mukherjee

How to be both by Ali Smith

    Having read only two of the longlisted titles, I'm not in much of a position to comment, but on the basis of those two I do think it's a poor show that Niall Williams' History of the Rain has missed the cut. See yesterday's post for more on that.

  The winner will be announced on Tuesday, 14th. October.