The Costa Book Awards is the only major UK book prize that is open solely to authors resident in the UK and Ireland and also, uniquely, recognises the most enjoyable books across five categories – First Novel, Novel, Biography, Poetry and Children’s Book – published in the last year.
Originally established in 1971 by Whitbread Plc, Costa announced its takeover of the sponsorship of one of the UK’s most prestigious book prizes in 2006. 2014 marks the 43rd year of the Book Awards.
This year’s Costa Book Awards attracted 640 entries – the highest number of entries ever received in one year. Judges on this year’s panels (three per category) included writers Maggie O’Farrell, Elizabeth Buchan, Bernardine Evaristo and Wendy Moore, children’s author Jonathan Stroud, poet and author Owen Sheers and Radio 2 Book Club Producer, Joe Haddow.
Winners in the five categories, who each receive £5,000, will be announced on Monday 5th January 2015. The overall winner of the Costa Book of the Year 2014 will receive £30,000 and will be selected and announced at the Costa Book Awards ceremony in central London on Tuesday 27th January 2015.
Christopher Rogers, Managing Director of Costa, commented, “What a fantastic selection of books. If people are looking for recommendations of what books to buy for Christmas this year, then they’re all here. This list really demonstrates what a great year it’s been for books – I can’t wait to sit down and read them.”
The winner of the Costa Short Story Award, voted for by the public, will also be announced at the ceremony. The shortlisted six stories for the Costa Short Story Award, now in its third year, will be revealed on the Costa Book Awards website, www.costabookawards.com, on Tuesday 25th November 2014.
Since the introduction of the Book of the Year award in 1985, it has been won eleven times by a novel, five times by a first novel, five times by a biography, seven times by a collection of poetry and once by a children’s book. The 2013 Costa Book of the Year was The Shock of the Fall by debut novelist Nathan Filer which has gone on to sell over 300, 000 copies to date across all formats.
To be eligible for the 2014 Costa Book Awards, books must have been first published in the UK or Ireland between 1 November 2013 and 31 October 2014 and their authors resident in the UK for the previous three years.
COSTA BOOK AWARDS 2014 SHORTLISTS
2014 Costa Novel Award shortlist
Neel Mukherjee for The Lives of Others (Chatto & Windus)
Monique Roffey for House of Ashes (Simon and Schuster)
Ali Smith for How to be both (Hamish Hamilton)
Colm Tóibín for Nora Webster (Viking)
2014 Costa First Novel Award shortlist
Carys Bray for A Song for Issy Bradley (Hutchinson)
Mary Costello for Academy Street (Canongate)
Emma Healey for Elizabeth is Missing (Viking)
Simon Wroe for Chop Chop (Viking)
2014 Costa Biography Award Shortlist
John Campbell for Roy Jenkins: A Well-Rounded Life (Jonathan Cape)
Marion Coutts for The Iceberg: A Memoir (Atlantic Books)
Helen Macdonald for H is for Hawk (Jonathan Cape)
Henry Marsh for Do No Harm: Stories of Life, Death and Brain Surgery (Weidenfeld & Nicolson)
2014 Costa Poetry Award shortlist
Colette Bryce for The Whole and Rain-domed Universe (Picador)
Jonathan Edwards for My Family and Other Superheroes (Seren)
Lavinia Greenlaw for A Double Sorrow: Troilus and Criseyde (Faber & Faber)
Kei Miller for The Cartographer Tries to Map a Way to Zion (Carcanet)
2014 Costa Children’s Book Award shortlist
Simon Mason for Running Girl (David Fickling Books/Random House Children’s Publishers)
Michael Morpurgo for Listen to the Moon (HarperCollins Children’s Books)
Kate Saunders for Five Children on the Western Front (Faber & Faber)
Marcus Sedgwick for The Ghosts of Heaven (Indigo)
Shortlist for the 2014 Costa Novel Award
(182 entries)
Judges
Elizabeth Buchan Author
Bernardine Evaristo Writer
Jasper Sutcliffe Head of Buying, Foyles
The Lives of Others by Neel Mukherjee (Chatto & Windus)
Calcutta, 1967. Unnoticed by his family, Supratik has become dangerously involved in extremist political activism. Compelled by an idealistic desire to change his life and the world around him, all he leaves behind before disappearing is a note…The ageing patriarch and matriarch of his family, the Ghoshes, preside over their large household, unaware that beneath the barely ruffled surface of their lives the sands are shifting. More than poisonous rivalries among sisters-in-law, destructive secrets, and the implosion of the family business, this is a family unravelling as the society around it fractures. For this is a moment of turbulence, of inevitable and unstoppable change: the chasm between the generations, and between those who have and those who have not, has never been wider.
Neel Mukherjee was born in Calcutta. His first novel, A Life Apart (2010), won the Vodafone-Crossword Award in India, the Writers’ Guild of Great Britain Award for best fiction, and was shortlisted for the inaugural DSC Prize for South Asian Literature. This is his second novel. He lives in London.
Judges: “Politically charged, ambitious and sometimes harsh in its evocation of India, it teems with memorable characters and the complexities of family.”
House of Ashes by Monique Roffey (Simon and Schuster)
In Sans Amen, tensions are running high. The corrupt government has been ruling over the people too long. One hot evening The Leader, head of a group of rebels, gathers his followers and tells them that it is time to take back what is theirs. And so a ragtag collection of men and boys take up arms . . .
Monique Roffeywas born in Port of Spain, Trinidad, and educated in the UK. She has held the post of Royal Literary Fund Fellow at Sussex, Chichester and Greenwich universities. She is the author of the highly-acclaimed novel,The White Woman on the Green Bicycle, which was shortlisted for the Orange Prize for Fiction 2010 and the Encore Award 2011; and Archipelago, which won the 2013 OCM Bocas Prize for Caribbean Literature.
Judges: “A tautly-constructed story which plots the violence and upheaval of revolution and its aftermath, it is both moving and memorable.”
How to be both by Ali Smith (Hamish Hamilton)
How to be both is a novel all about art’s versatility. Borrowing from painting’s fresco technique to make an original literary double-take, it’s a fast-moving genre-bending conversation between forms, times, truths and fictions. There’s a renaissance artist of the 1460s. There’s the child of a child of the 1960s. Two tales of love and injustice twist into a singular yarn where time gets timeless, structural gets playful, knowing gets mysterious, fictional gets real – and all life’s givens get given a second chance.
Ali Smith was born in Inverness in 1962 and lives in Cambridge. She is the author of several books including Hotel World, which was shortlisted for the Booker and the Orange Prize, and The Accidental which was shortlisted for both those prizes and won the Whitbread Novel Award. How to be both has just won the 2014 Goldsmiths Prize.
Judges: “Dazzlingly imaginedand daringly inventive, it’s both resonant and moving.”
Nora Webster by Colm Tóibín (Viking)
It is the late 1960s in Ireland. Nora Webster is living in a small town, looking after her four children, trying to rebuild her life after the death of her husband. She is fiercely intelligent, at times difficult and impatient, at times kind, but she is trapped by her circumstances, and waiting for a chance which will lift her beyond them. Slowly, through the gift of music and the power of friendship, she finds a glimmer of hope and a way of starting again.
Colm Tóibín was born in Enniscorthy in 1955. He is the author of seven other novels including The Blackwater Lightship, The Master and The Testament of Mary, all three of which were nominated for the Booker Prize; and Brooklyn, which won the Costa Novel Award. The film adaptation of Brooklyn starring Saoirse Ronan, Julie Walters and Jim Broadbent will be released in 2015, with a screenplay by Nick Hornby. Tóibín has also published two collections of stories and many works of non-fiction. He lives in Dublin.
Judges: “A beautiful novel which is a joy and pleasure to read.”
Shortlist for the 2014 Costa First Novel Award
(125 entries)
Judges
Joanne Finney Books Editor, Good Housekeeping
Joe Haddow Producer, Radio 2 Book Club
Maggie O’Farrell Writer
A Song for Issy Bradley by Carys Bray (Hutchinson)
When Issy dies, her father Ian, Bishop of the local congregation, expects the rest of the family to be comforted by the knowledge that they’ll see her again in heaven. But her mother Claire won’t get out of her dead daughter’s bottom bunk. She’s never believed in The Book of Mormon in the same way that Ian does. Son Alma thinks the church is a waste of time. H just wants to be a normal teenager; he wants to play football and for Liverpool to win the championship. And Zippy is trying so hard to be virtuous – but she’s seventeen and she thinks she’s in love. While seven year-old Jacob knows that his faith is bigger than a mustard seed; it’s at least as big as a toffee bonbon, maybe bigger. And he knows that if he wants Issy back, he’s going to have to perform a resurrection miracle.
Carys Bray was brought up in a devout Mormon family. In her early thirties she left the church and replaced religion with writing. She was awarded the Scott Prize for her debut short story collection, Sweet Home. She lives in Southport with her husband and four children.
Judges: “A deeply moving story about grief and faith, told with the lightest of touches.”
Academy Street by Mary Costello (Canongate)
Born to Irish parents in the 1940s, Tess is a shy child. But beneath her quiet exterior lies a heart of fire. A fire that will drive her to board a flight for America and make a home for herself amongst the hurly burly of 1960s New York. In Tess’s new life on Academy Street in Manhattan, she grows, grieves, loves and loses. But what lasts is her bravery and endurance in the face of a life that is constantly ‘floating close to hazard’.
Mary Costello, originally fromGalway, lives in Dublin. Her early stories were published in New Irish Writing and she was shortlisted for a Hennessy Award. Her first book, a collection of short stories entitled The China Factory, was nominated for the Guardian First Book Award and shortlisted for the Irish Book Awards. Her stories have been broadcast by BBC and RTE (Ireland) radio.
Judges: “A remarkable debut with a transcendent, quiet power.”
Elizabeth is Missing by Emma Healey (Viking)
Maud is forgetful. She makes a cup of tea and doesn’t remember to drink it. She goes to the shops and forgets why she went. Back home she finds the place horribly unrecognizable – just like she sometimes thinks her daughter Helen is a total stranger. But there’s one thing Maud is sure of: her friend Elizabeth is missing. The note in her pocket tells her so. And no matter who tells her to stop going on about it, to leave it alone, to shut up, Maud will get to the bottom of it. Because somewhere in Maud’s damaged mind lies the answer to an unsolved seventy-year-old mystery. One everyone has forgotten about. Everyone, except Maud . . .
Emma Healey wrote her first short story when she was four, told her teachers she was going to be a writer when she was eight, but had learnt better by twelve and had decided on being a litigator (inspired entirely by the film Clueless). It took another ten years before she came back to writing. She grew up in London where she went to art college and completed her first degree in bookbinding. She then worked for two libraries, two bookshops, two art galleries and two universities, and was busily pursuing a career in the art world before writing overtook everything. She moved to Norwich in 2010 to study for the MA in Creative Writing at UEA and never moved back again.
Judges: “Utterly captivating and original.”
Chop Chop by Simon Wroe (Viking)
Two months behind on his rent, young graduate Monocle swallows his dreams and takes the only job he can find: the lowest-rung chef in a gastropub in Camden. Here he finds himself surrounded by a group of deranged, criminal hoodlums (his co-workers) and at the mercy of an ingenious sadist (the head chef, Bob). What follows is a furiously-paced, ribald, raucous and deeply touching tale of loyalty and revenge, dark appetites and fading dreams, and a young man finding his way in the world as he is plunged into the fat and the frying pan and everything else besides.
Simon Wroe is a former chef who writes about food and culture for Prospect and the Economist, and regularly contributes to a wide range of publications including The Times, Guardian, Telegraph and Evening Standard. He is 31 and lives in London.
Judges: “A brave, audacious, invigorating and pacy black comedy.”
Shortlist for the 2014 Costa Biography Award
(111 entries)
Judges
Paul Laity Non-Fiction Books Editor, The Guardian
Wendy Moore Author and Freelance Journalist
Sheila O’Reilly Owner, Dulwich Books
Roy Jenkins: A Well-Rounded Life by John Campbell (Jonathan Cape)
Roy Jenkins was probably the best Prime Minister Britain never had. But though he never reached 10 Downing Street, he left a more enduring mark on British society than most of those who did. His career spans the full half-century from Attlee to Tony Blair, during which he helped transform almost every area of national life and politics.On top of his political achievements, Jenkins was a compulsive writer whose twenty-three books included best-selling biographies of Asquith, Gladstone and Churchill. As Chancellor of Oxford University, he was the embodiment of the liberal establishment with a genius for friendship; he also had many close women friends and enjoyed an unconventional private life. His biography is the story of an exceptionally well-filled and well-rounded life.
John Campbell is the author of many biographies including one of Edward Heath, for which he won the 1994 NCR Award, and The Iron Lady: Margaret Thatcher, from Grocer’s Daughter to Iron Lady.
Judges: “A fascinating, brilliantly-researched biography of a major politician who had a huge impact on British life.”
The Iceberg: A Memoir by Marion Coutts (Atlantic Books)
The Iceberg gives an account of a small family unit under assault, and the inventiveness by which they tried to stay together. It charts the deterioration of Tom’s speech even as it records the developing language of his child. It navigates the journey from home to hospital to hospice. Fury, selfishness, grief, indignity, impotence, all are examined and brought to light. Yet out of this comes a story about belonging. It speaks of an ‘adventure of being and dying’. The book becomes a celebration, of friends, art, work, happiness, love and language.
Marion Coutts is an artist and writer. She was born in Nigeria and studied in Scotland. She works in video, film, sculpture and photography and her work has been exhibited widely nationally and internationally. She has held fellowships at Tate Liverpool and Kettle’s Yard, Cambridge. In 2001, she married the art critic Tom Lubbock. After his death in 2011, she wrote the introduction to his memoir Until Further Notice, I Am Alive and is the editor of English Graphic, an anthology of his essays. She is a Lecturer in Art at Goldsmiths College and lives in London.
Judges: “An unflinching, unforgettable memoir written with honesty, an absence of sentimentality and in utterly original language.”
H is for Hawk by Helen Macdonald (Jonathan Cape)
From the age of seven, Helen Macdonald was determined to become a falconer. She learned the arcane terminology and read all the classic books, including T.H. White’s tortured masterpiece, The Goshawk, which describes White’s struggle to train a hawk as a spiritual contest. When her father dies and she is knocked sideways by grief, she becomes obsessed with the idea of training her own goshawk. She buys Mabel for £800 on a Scottish quayside and takes her home to Cambridge. Then she fills the freezer with hawk food and unplugs the phone, ready to embark on the long, strange business of trying to train this wildest of animals.
Helen Macdonald is a writer, poet, illustrator, historian and affiliate at the Department of History and Philosophy of Science at the University of Cambridge. Her books include Falcon (2006) and Shaler’s Fish (2001). H is for Hawk won the 2014 Samuel Johnson Prize for Non-Fiction.
Judges: “A beautifully-layered memoir centred on nature and survival in superlative and original prose.”
Do No Harm: Stories of Life, Death and Brain Surgery by Henry Marsh (Weidenfeld & Nicolson)
What is it really like to be a brain surgeon, to hold someone’s life in your hands, to drill down into the stuff that creates thought, feeling and reason? How do you live with the consequences of performing a potentially life-saving operation when it all goes wrong? In this powerful and brutally honest account, one of the country’s top neurosurgeons reveals what it is to play God in the face of the life-and-death situations he encounters daily. Henry Marsh gives a rare insight into the intense drama of the operating theatre, the chaos and confusion of a modern hospital, the exquisite complexity of the human brain, and the blunt instrument that is surgeon’s knife by comparison.
Henry Marsh read Politics, Philosophy and Economics at Oxford University before studying medicine at the Royal Free Hospital in London. He became a Fellow of the Royal College of Surgeons in 1984 and was appointed Consultant Neurosurgeon at Atkinson Morley’s/St George’s in 1987, where he still works. He has been the subject of two major documentary films: Your Life in Their Hands, which won the Royal Television Society Gold Medal, and The English Surgeon, which won an Emmy. In his spare time he keeps bees and makes furniture. He was made a CBE in 2010. He is married to the anthropologist and writer Kate Fox. Do No Harm is Henry Marsh’s first book.
Judges: “An addictive, eye-opening and poetic exploration of a brain surgeon’s doubts and drive.”
Shortlist for the 2014 Costa Poetry Award (76 entries)
Judges
Anna Dreda Independent Bookseller, Founder, Wenlock Poetry Festival
Charlotte Runcie Poet and Arts Journalist, Daily Telegraph
Owen Sheers Poet and Author
The Whole and Rain-domed Universe by Colette Bryce (Picador)
The Whole and Rain-domed Universe is a vivid and sometimes unsettling account of growing up in Derry in the Troubles. Often from the scale and intensity of a child’s perspective, Bryce describes the warmth and eccentricity of family, as well as the claustrophobia of family life. The collection is shot through with the atmosphere of suspicion and surveillance that pervaded the time, along with the real and present threat of violence. There are poems about borders and hinterlands, emigration and return, and how the female line operates within a male-dominated tradition.
Colette Bryce grew up in Derry, Northern Ireland.She lived for some years in Londonbefore moving to Scotland in 2002 and later to the North of England, where she now works as a freelance writer. Her previous collections with Picador include The Heel of Bernadette (2000), The Full Indian Rope Trick (2004) and Self-Portrait in the Dark (2008). From 2009 to 2013 she was Poetry Editor at Poetry London. She received the Cholmondeley Award in 2010.
Judges: “A deft, important collection – lyrical yet grounded, playful but resonant.”
My Family and Other Superheroes by Jonathan Edwards (Seren)
Edward’ssuperheroes are a motley crew. Evel Knievel, Sophia Loren, Ian Rush, Marty McFly, a bicycling nun and a recalcitrant hippo all leap from these pages and jostle for position, alongside Valleys mams, dads and bamps, described with great warmth. Other poems focus on the crammed terraces and abandoned high streets where a working-class and Welsh nationalist politics is hammered out. This is a post-industrial Valleys upbringing re-imagined through the prism of pop culture and surrealism.
Jonathan Edwards was born and brought up in Crosskeys, South Wales. He has an MA in Writing from the University of Warwick, has written speeches for the Welsh Assembly Government and journalism for The Big Issue Cymru, and currently works as an English teacher. Prizes he’s won include the Terry Hetherington Award in 2010, the Basil Bunting Award and Second Prize in the 2012 Cardiff International Poetry Competition. His work has appeared in a wide range of magazines, including Poetry Review, The North, Poetry Wales and New Welsh Review.
Judges: “Joyful and dynamic – a collection that’ll make you laugh and make you think.”
A Double Sorrow: Troilus and Criseyde by Lavinia Greenlaw (Faber)
Set against the Siege of Troy, A Double Sorrow tells of the Trojan hero Troilus and his beloved Criseyde, whose traitorous father defects to the Greeks and persuades them to ask for his daughter in an exchange for prisoners. It is a tale that has been passed from one writer to another over centuries, evolving and enduring as a tragedy of human nature that speaks to us all. Lavinia Greenlaw’s pinpoint retelling is neither a translation nor a version but something new. She has drawn out the story’s psychological drama through a process of detonation or amplification of image and phrase into original poems. Through a series of seven-line vignettes, we see the intensity with which these characters argue each other and themselves into and out of love.
Lavinia Greenlaw was born in London where she has lived for most of her life. Her poetry includes The Casual Perfect and Minsk and she has also published novels and two works of non-fiction.. Her interest in image-making and questions of perception, both central to Troilus and Criseyde, led her to study seventeenth-century Dutch art at the Courtauld Institute and to become the first artist-in-residence at the Science Museum. Her work for BBC radio includes programmes about the Arctic, the Baltic, Emily Dickinson and Elizabeth Bishop.
Judges: “Poised and beautiful – an elegant, skilfully-crafted jewel of a book.”
The Cartographer Tries to Map a Way to Zion by Kei Miller (Carcanet)
In his new collection, acclaimed Jamaican poet Kei Miller dramatises what happens when one system of knowledge, one method of understanding, place and territory, comes up against another. We watch as the cartographer, used to scientific methods of assuming control over a place by mapping it, is gradually compelled to recognise a wholly different understanding of place, as he tries to map his way to the rastaman’s eternal city of Zion. As the book unfolds, the cartographer learns that, on this island of roads that ‘constrict like throats’, every place name comes freighted with history, and not every place that can be named can be found.
Kei Miller was born in Jamaica in 1978. He was educated at the University of the West Indies and Manchester Metropolitan University. He has published two previous collections of poetry with Carcanet: There Is an Anger That Moves (2007) and A Light Song of Light (2010). He also edited New Caribbean Poetry: An Anthology (Carcanet, 2007). He teaches Creative Writing at the University of Glasgow. The Cartographer Tries to Map a Way to Zion was shortlisted for the 2014 International Dylan Thomas Prize for Literature and won the 2014 Forward Prize for Best Poetry Collection.
Judges: “An agile, confident collection of sustained intelligence and skill.”
Shortlist for the 2014 Costa Children’s Book Award
(146 entries)
Judges
Lorna Bradbury Deputy Literary Editor, Daily Telegraph
Jake Hope Freelance Reading Development and Children’s Book Consultant
Jonathan Stroud Author
Running Girl by Simon Mason (David Fickling Books/Random House Children’s Publishers)
Meet Garvie Smith. Highest IQ ever recorded at Marsh Academy. Lowest ever grades. What’s the point, anyway? Life sucks. Nothing ever happens. Until Chloe Dow’s body is pulled from a pond. DI Singh is already on the case. Ambitious, uptight, methodical – he’s determined to solve the mystery and get promoted. He doesn’t need any ‘assistance’ from notorious slacker, Smith. Or does he?
Simon Mason is an author of children’s and adult books. His first adult novel, a black comedy entitled The Great English Nude, won the Betty Trask first novel award and Moon Pie was shortlisted for the Guardian Children’s Fiction prize. Running Girl is his first story starring Garvie Smith. Simon lives in Oxford with his wife and their two children.
Judges: “For older teenagers, this is a fast-paced, gripping detective thriller that keeps you guessing. Unputdownable.”
Listen to the Moon by Michael Morpurgo (Harper Collins Children’s Books)
It is May 1915. WWI is raging and suspicion and fear are everywhere. Then one day Alfie and his fisherman father find a girl on an uninhabited island in the Scillies. Injured, lost, and with no memory of who she is, or how she came to be there, she can say only one word: Lucy. Is she a mermaid, the victim of a German U-boat, or even – as some islanders suggest – a German spy? Only one thing is for sure: she loves music and moonlight, and when she listens to the gramophone the glimmers of the girl she once was begin to appear. Then there is Merry, a girl boarding a great ship, the Lusitania, for a perilous journey across the ocean – a journey which is never completed.
Michael Morpurgo OBE is one of Britain’s best-loved writers for children. He has written over 100 books and won numerous prizes, including the Blue Peter Book Award, the Whitbread Award and the Smarties Prize. His novel War Horse has become an international sensation following its adaptation for stage and screen. A former Children’s Laureate, Michael is also the co-founder, with his wife Clare, of the charity Farms for City Children.
Judges: “A captivating, utterly transporting war novel that lives on powerfully in the memory.”
Five Children on the Western Front by Kate Saunders (Faber & Faber)
When the Sand Fairy suddenly reappears after nine years, everything is different. Cyril is about to leave for war and the other children are nearly adults. It’s up to the Lamb and the youngest child, Edie, to try and help the Psammead get home. The siblings are pleased to have something to take their minds off the war, but the Psammead has lost his magic, and his past has caught up with him. Before this last adventure ends, everything will have changed, and the two younger children will have seen the Great War from every possible viewpoint – factory-workers, soldiers and sailors, nurses and the people left at home – and the war’s impact will be felt right at the heart of their family.
Kate Saunders is a full-time author and journalist and has written numerous books for adults and children. Her books for children have won awards and received rave reviews, and include future classics such as Beswitched and The Whizz Pop Chocolate Shop. Her adult books include The Crooked Castle and The Marrying Game. Kate lives in London.
Judges: “A beautifully-written exploration of the power of love in the face of the horrors of war. Elegant, funny and profoundly moving.”
The Ghosts of Heaven by Marcus Sedgwick (Indigo)
The spiral has existed as long as time has existed. It’s there when a girl walks through the forest, the green air clinging to her skin. There centuries later in a pleasant green dale, hiding the treacherous waters of Golden Beck that take Anna, who they call a witch. There on the other side of the world, where a mad poet watches the waves and knows the horrors they hide, and far into the future as Keir Bowman realises his destiny. Each takes their next step in life. None will ever go back to the same place. And so their journeys begin…
Marcus Sedgwick is a full-time author. His first novel, Floodland, won the Branford Boase Award for the Best Debut Children’s Novel of 2000. Since then his books have been shortlisted for the Guardian Children’s Fiction Prize, the Blue Peter Book Award, the Costa Children’s Book Award (2007), the Carnegie Medal and the Edgar Allan Poe Award. His previous novel, Midwinterblood, won the 2014 Michael L. Printz Award. He lives near Cambridge.
Judges: “A startlingly original novel with a strong conceptual link to the motif of a spiral. A hugely ambitious work.”
