Shortlist for the Costa Book Award, a popular prize here in the UK (it used to be called Whitbread, I think). I'm not particularly thrilled by this shortlist, apart from maybe Sebastian Barry and Sadie Jones.
Novel Award Shortlist
- The Secret Scripture by Sebastian Barry: an alternative history of Ireland told through the journals of an old woman and her psychiatrist. Already shortlisted for the Booker Prize;
- The Other Hand by Chris Cleave: the intertwined stories of an African girl and a British magazine editor
- A Partisan's Daughter by Louis de Bernières: about the friendship between a man trapped in a loveless marriage and the Yugoslavian he mistakes for a hooker
- Trauma by Patrick McGrath: the story of a conflicted New York psychiatrist
First Novel Award Shortlist
- The Behaviour of Moths by Poppy Adams: about the secrets that separate two sisters
- The Outcast by Sadie Jones: set in the 1950s, about a 19-year-old boy just out of jail
- Child 44 by Tom Rob Smith: a thriller set in Stalinist Russia
- Inside the Whale by Jennie Rooney: the story of two characters separated by the second world war
