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Other Other Prizes

The Desmond Elliott Prize

I have just discovered the Desmond Elliott Prize. It was launched in 2007 as a biennial award for a first novel published in the UK.

The 2009 long list has just been announced, and I am very tempted to read them all. The only one I have read so far is The Behaviour of Moths (The Sister in America) which I really enjoyed. I also have Mr Toppit in the TBR pile and have heard great things about  Blackmoor.

These are the long listed books:
All plot summaries taken from the Desmond Elliott Prize Website

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A Girl Made of Dust by Nathalie Abi-Ezzi (Fourth Estate)

Ten-year-old Ruba lives in a village outside Beirut. From her home she can see buildings shimmering on the horizon and the sea stretched out beside them. She can also hear the rumble of shelling – this is Lebanon in the 1980s and civil war is tearing the country apart.

Ruba, however, has her own worries. Her father hardly ever speaks and spends most of the day sitting in an armchair, avoiding work and family. Her older brother Naji is beginning to spend time with older boys – and some of them have guns. When Ruba uncovers her father’s secret, she starts a journey that takes her from childhood to the beginning of adulthood. As Israeli troops invade and danger comes ever closer, she realises that she may not be able to keep her family safe.     

The Behaviour of Moths by Poppy Adams (Virago)

From her lookout on the first floor, Ginny watches and waits for her younger sister to return to the crumbling mansion that was once their idyllic childhood home. Vivien has not set foot in the house since she left forty-seven years ago; Ginny, the reclusive moth expert, has rarely ventured outside it. Selling off the family furniture over the years and gradually shutting off each wing of the house, she has retreated into the precise routines that define her days.

With Vivien’s arrival, long-forgotten memories are stirred up, and the secrets that have separated the sisters threaten to disrupt more than Ginny’s carefully ordered world.

Girl in a Blue Dress by Gaynor Arnold (Tindal Street Press)

Alfred Gibson’s funeral has taken place at Westminster Abbey and his wife of twenty years, Dorothea, has not been invited. She is comforted by her feisty daughter, Kitty, until an invitation for a private audience with Queen Victoria arrives and she begins to examine her own life more closely.

Dorothea uncovers the deviousness and hypnotic power of her celebrity-author husband. But now she will have to face her grown-up children and – worse – her redoubtable younger sister Sissy and the charming actress, Miss Ricketts.  

Mr Toppit by Charles Elton (Viking)

When The Hayseed Chronicles, an obscure series of children’s books, become world-famous, millions of readers are intrigued by the shadowy figure of Mr Toppit who dominates them. The author, Arthur Hayman, never reaps the benefits of his books’ success. The legacy passes to his widow Martha and their children – the fragile Rachel, and Luke, recently immortalised as Luke Hayseed, the central character of his father’s stories. But others want their share, particularly Laurie, the overweight stranger from California who comforted Arthur as he was dying, who has an agenda of her own that threatens to change all their lives. For, buried deep in the books, lie secrets which threaten to erupt as the family begins to crumble under the heavy burden of their inheritance.

Never Never by David Gaffney (Tindal Street Press)

Eric is a debt counsellor and his life is a lie. When he’s not busy getting the dispossessed of West Cumbria’s debts written off, he’s using his insider knowledge to bounce the cost of his excessive lifestyle between several accounts – some of which aren’t exactly high-street. His girlfriend Charlotte has no idea how imperiled their home is.

Until the caravan postcards begin to arrive, each with only one word written on the back: Coerce. Harassment. Distress. Eric has a frightening puzzle to solve while juggling his finances. And his life gets more complicated as he reconnects with his teenage punk sweetheart in Manchester: Julie, a strange, fragile body artist.

With the loan sharks on his tail, he has to find a way to save his home – and keep the menacing Overspill Mayor away from Julie.    

Blackmoor by Edward Hogan (Simon & Schuster)

“You said once that Blackmoor killed Mum.”

“I suppose you don’t think that a place can kill a person,” says George.

Vincent shrugs. “I just want to know how.”

“Slowly, that’s how.”

Bird-watching teenager Vincent Cartwright lives out a bullied, awkward existence not far from the site of Blackmoor, a mysterious, vanished Derbyshire village. His mother Beth, half-blind and unknowable, and her life and death in that same village has always been a dark family secret, but as Vincent comes of age he begins to search for the truth.

The Redemption of Alexander Seaton by Shona MacLean (Quercus)

Banff, Scotland, 1626. The body of the apothecary’s apprentice is found in Alexander Seaton’s schoolhouse, murdered by poisoning. Seaton is a schoolmaster by default, a disgraced would-be minister whose love affair with an aristocrat’s daughter left him dishonoured and deprived of his vocation. Persona non grata in the town, he has few friends, so, when one of them is accused of the murder, he sets out to solve the crime. He embarks on a journey that will uncover witchcraft, cruelty, prejudice and the darkness in men’s souls. It is also a personal quest that will lead Alexander to the rediscovery of his own faith in God as well as his belief in himself.

 

The Rescue Man by Anthony Quinn (Jonathan Cape)

Summer 1939. Historian Tom Baines is at work on a study of Liverpool’s architectural past. If war should come, will the buildings and streets that he documents survive? Then his faltering project gets a boost when a photographer, Richard Tanqueray, and his wife Bella befriend him and together they work against the clock of a rapidly contracting peacetime.

A further preoccupation takes hold when he begins to read the journals of a brilliant young Victorian architect, Peter Eames, who briefly flourished in Liverpool in the 1860s. Through him, Baines comes to a fuller understanding of the nature of genius, but also the mysterious workings of the human heart. Eames’s own legacy will have unexpected reverberations seventy years later when war comes and Baines joins a Heavy Rescue team, retrieving the wounded from bomb-damaged buildings. With the ordinary rules of life suspended and mortal danger ever-present, he finds his courage tested – and his conscience troubled as an adulterous lover.  


Little Gods by Anna Richards (Picador)

Jean Clocker is conceived by her mother Wisteria only as a means to entrap a damaged First World War veteran into marriage. Having achieved wedlock but failed in her plan to rid herself of the now-redundant snare, Wisteria visits maternal tyranny on her prodigious daughter. Jean spends her early years avoiding her mother’s blows and striving to make herself just a little less extraordinary. Orphaned, finally released from servitude, in the opening days of the Second World War, she thrives as a member of a demolition crew. It is Denny, a tiny, charismatic GI with a reverence for size, who facilitates a second liberation as he takes her across the ocean as a GI bride. But, once in California, he disappears and Jean is left once more to negotiate the world on her own.

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The Alternative Hero by Tim Thornton (Jonathan Cape)

By the time most people hit 30, they’ve managed to do one of the following things: grow up; meet one of their heroes; move on a bit from the music they were obsessed with at the age of 17. Clive Beresford has failed to do all three. He mopes around, broke, drinking too much, disgusted at the deletion of the bands he loves, quietly lamenting his never-was career as a music journalist. But all, or at least some, of that is about to change. One Saturday morning, Clive sees the biggest alternative rock star of them all walking down the high street: Lance Webster, disgraced ex-singer of Thieving Magpies. Determined to grab the scoop of a lifetime, Clive hatches a ramshackle plan to befriend his idol, although Webster proves to be in no mood for discussing the past. But the pair quickly realise they have things in common neither could have realised, forcing both to revisit a period they thought they’d left behind: the sweat, feedback, T-shirts, stage-dives, hitch-hikes, snakebites and hangovers of British alternative rock at the start of the Nineties.


I have just ordered a copy of Never Never as I lived in West Cumbria during the 90s. I have never read a book based there, so am really interested to see how it is portrayed. I don’t think I can justify reading the entire long list at the moment, but I will be keeping my eye on this prize in the future.

Have you read any of these books?

Have you ever heard of this prize before?

Categories
2009 Chick Lit Historical Fiction

A Secret Alchemy – Emma Darwin

The Secret Alchemy is set in both present day and 15th century England. The interwoven stories are seen through the eyes of both Elizabeth Woodville, the beautiful widow of King Edward IV, and her brother Anthony; whilst the modern section is told by historian, Una, who is writing a book on Anthony Woodville’s library. Elizabeth Woodville is the mother of the famous ‘Princes in the Tower’, who were imprisoned in the Tower by their uncle, Richard, Duke of Gloucester, after Edaward’s death.

I was impressed by the way each section came across differently, with all three characters having a recognisable voice, although I’m not sure how accurate the language of the historical section was. I’m not an expert, but it just reads differently from other books written about this period.

I didn’t think that the modern day section was really necessary. I felt the book could have benefited from concentrating on Elizabeth’s story, as I really enjoyed reading about her. Una’s character just seemed to be there to explain the history of the War of the Roses, which although I found useful, should have been able to be achieved within the historical section. I think that anyone who knows much about this period of history would feel patronised by the continual explanations of events, but luckily for me, my only knowledge of this period comes from reading Jean Plaidy books, and that was a while ago now! Towards the end the number of characters got a bit confusing for me, so I had to keep referring to the family tree provided in the front of the book, so I’m really pleased that was included.

This book is light and easy to read, but lacks the atmosphere of a great piece of historical fiction. I can see why this book would appeal to many people, but I felt that it meandered around a bit too much and so failed to really engage me. 

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Emma Darwin’s first book The Mathematics of Love was short listed for the Commonwealth Writer’s Prize (Best First Book, Europe and South Asia) in 2007. It seems to have much more favourable reviews than this one. Has anyone read it?

Categories
Other

Links I’ve stumbled across this week

Bookish Links

  • I think this qualifies as the weirdest news story I found this week: Popular Japanese horror writer Koji Suzuki will publish a short horror story on toilet roll.  I can’t imagine anyone is actually going to use it as toilet roll, but I guess it is a good marketing tool!
  • The Man Booker Prize has announced that there have been more entries submitted than ever before.  Entries for this year’s Man Booker Prize  are up from 114 last year to 133 . I found this article about how the books are selected really interesting.
  • I’ve just discovered Readiac. The site aims to showcase only books which people love. They are asking for reviews of your favourite books, so if you’d like to submit your gushing reviews, go and take a look.
  • Book Binge had a really interesting discussion on infidelity in romance. I’d never really thought about it before, but I think this is why I have a problem with a lot of ‘chick lit’ books, and may be why I didn’t love The Post-Birthday World as much as other people did. I think I’ve realised that I have a problem with infidelity, and just don’t empathize as much with characters who have affairs.

New Blog Discoveries

  • I’ve just discovered this new blog in need of a bit of love. I was the first person to comment on it, and so feel I now have a special duty to share my discovery! Verity obviously has very good taste in authors, as she rushed out to buy Little Stranger as soon as it was released, and then read it during her tea breaks! I hope you can welcome her into the blogging world.
  • I have also discovered Paperback Reader, if you like my blog then you’ll love hers, as she has a scarily similar reading taste to mine.

Books I’ve added to the wish list this week

  • I had never heard of Heather Armstrong and her hugely popular blog, but after reading Heather’s review, I’ve added It Sucked and Then I Cried to the wish list.
  • My newly discovered blog, Paperback Reader (see above) managed to add a book to my wish list straight away. Her review of Snow Goose has persuaded me to find a copy soon, and it is only 48 pages long, so should be easy to squeeze into the schedule! 

Amazing Give Away!

I don’t often blog about give aways, as they are very rarely international, and those that are often don’t appeal to me, but this one is special:

Nicole at Linus’s Blanket is hosting the best give away I’ve ever seen. (I’m easily excited by rare international give aways!) She is giving away an ARC copy of Catching Fire by Susanne Collins . This is the book I am most looking forward to reading this year, so I’m keeping everything crossed for a win. Wish me luck!

Categories
2000 - 2007 Books in Translation Recommended books Thriller

Out – Natsuo Kirino

 Translated from the Japanese by Stephen Snyder

A few weeks ago I raved about how Sophie Hannah’s Little Face was the best thriller I have ever read – not any more – Out has leapfrogged way past her, straight into my all time top ten books.

As with Little Face, Out isn’t the normal whodunit mystery. We witness the murder very early on, and so the main question for the rest of the book is: Will they get caught?

Yoyoi is a young mother struggling to raise her two young children, and is suffering at the hands of her abusive husband. One night it all becomes too much for her to deal with, and so she murders her husband. She confides in her colleague, Masako, who agrees to help her dispose of the body. With the help of her co-workers Masako dismembers the body and hides the gruesome bits around the city. Unfortunately, some body parts are discovered and the police start asking questions. The plot becomes more complex, as loan sharks become involved, and the prime police suspect tries to find out the truth behind the crime he is innocent of committing

It is really hard to convey just how good this book is. It isn’t just that it is a cleverly plotted, perfectly paced book which is packed with complex characters and boasts a perfect ending. This book really makes you think. What would you do to protect a friend? If you were struggling financially – would you do anything to help your family? This book was so thought provoking that it became the focus of the majority of conversations I had with family and friends this week.

Out isn’t for the squeamish, as there are graphic descriptions of dismemberment and violent rape, but these images were important for conveying the situations that these Japanese women had to deal with. The vivid images I have of this book will stay with me for a very long time.

The only complaint I have is that there were a few minor translation problems. There was the odd sentance that didn’t flow properly, and a few uniquely Japanese things, which were translated in such a way that it lost some of the atmosphere for me. The recurring one being the boxed lunch, which doesn’t exist in the western world. I would much preferred it to be called by it’s Japanese name: the bento box,  as ‘boxed lunch’ doesn’t really bring across the same distinctly Japanese images it should do.

These are very minor issues though, and overall I cannot recommend this book highly enough. Cancel your order for Wilderness, and buy this instead!

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Thank you so much to Melody for recommending this to me. I will be paying much more interest to her recommendations in the future.

What is the best thriller you have ever read?
Have you read any books by Natsuo Kirino?
Are any of the others as good as this one?

but most importantly….would you help your best friend hide her dead husband?!!

Categories
Other Really Old Classics

Tale of Genji – Read Along

I wish to apologise in advance for the number of Tale of Genji posts about to descend on this blog.

Matthew is hosting a read along for The Tale of Genji. The plan is to read 3-4 chapters a week, starting today. The Tale of Genji is am imposing 54 chapters long. This means that you will have to endure Genji posts for a minimum of 14 weeks – that means they won’t end until at least the middle of September! Sorry!

If you can’t face reading my meaningless Genji posts for that long then you can do one of two things

  1. Ignore all Genji posts
  2. Join in!!!

The Tale of Genji is often quoted as being the world’s first ever novel. Written over a thousand years ago in Japan, it is about 800 hundred years older than any book I have ever read before. 

It easily qualifies for Rebecca’s really old classics challenge. I’m not taking part in her challenge at the moment, but depending on how well I cope with Genji I will definitely consider taking part next year.

I am reading the new Tyler translation of the book, which claims to have writing frseh enough to be enjoyed in today’s society. We’ll soon see if this is true!

This definitely qualifies as the most challenging book I have ever read. I don’t think I’ve ever felt so daunted about reading something before, and I would never have decided to read it without someone to read along with. Thank you Matthew!

Are you planning to join in?

If so, are you daunted by this book?

What is the most challenging book you have ever read?

Categories
Orange Prize Other

Home wins the Orange Prize

 

I don’t like to brag, but I correctly predicted that Home would win the Orange Prize.

I’m gutted. For two reasons:

  • Wilderness didn’t win.
  • I didn’t put any money on it.

Never mind. Let’s see if I can correctly predict the Booker!