This year's Costa
Book Awards attracted 616 entries, the highest-ever number of
submissions in one year. Judges on this year's panels (three per
category) included author Lisa Jewell; actress and writer Pauline
McLynn; journalist, writer and broadcaster Michael Buerk; poet and
broadcaster Roger McGough CBE; and writer Victoria Hislop. Three young
judges, selected by a competition run in UK Costa stores and online at
www.costabookawards.com,
joined the Children's Book Award panel. Roseanne McNulty, perhaps nearing her 100th birthday -- no one is quite sure -- faces an uncertain future, as the Roscommon Regional Mental Hospital where she's spent the best part of her adult life prepares for closure. Over the weeks leading up to this upheaval, she talks often with her psychiatrist Dr Grene. Told through their respective journals, the story that emerges is at once shocking and deeply beautiful. Refracted through the haze of memory and retelling, Roseanne's story becomes an alternative, secret, history of Ireland. Sebastian Barry
is a playwright and novelist who was born in Dublin in 1955. His novels
include The Whereabouts of Eneas McNulty (1998), Annie Dunne (2002) and
A Long Long Way (2005), which was shortlisted for the Man Booker Prize
and the Dublin International Impac Prize. He has won many awards
including the Christopher Ewart-Biggs Prize, the London Critics Circle
Award and the Kerry Group Irish Fiction Prize. Barry lives in Wicklow
with his wife and three children. Judges: "A
heartbreaking and lyrical tale of loss, betrayal and redemption." Little Bee is a
16-year-old African girl; Sarah is a magazine editor living in
Kingston-upon-Thames; Charlie is her 4-year-old son but will only
answer to "Batman." The Other Hand tells how their lives intertwine and
was inspired by the author's early childhood in West Africa and a visit
to a detention centre in Essex. Chris Cleave's
debut novel Incendiary was an international bestseller in 20 countries,
winning critical acclaim around the world and prizes including the 2006
Somerset Maugham Award, the United States Book-of-the-Month Club's
First Fiction award 2005 and the Prix Special du Jury at the French
Prix des Lecteurs 2007. Its subject matter, a terrorist attack on
London, proved all too prescient when it was published in the UK on 7th
July 2005. It will be released later this year as a major motion
picture. He is married with two children, and lives in London. Judges: "A richly
original novel full of shocks and wonders." Chris is bored,
lonely, trapped in a loveless, sexless marriage. In his forties, he's a
stranger to the 1970s youth culture of London, a stranger to himself on
the night he invites a hooker into his car. Roza is Yugoslavian,
recently moved to London, the daughter of one of Tito's partisans.
She's in her twenties, but has already lived a life filled with danger,
misadventure, romance, and tragedy. And though she's not a hooker, when
she's propositioned by Chris, she gets into his car anyway. Over the
next few months Roza tells Chris the stories of her past. But is Roza
telling the truth? Does Chris hear the stories through the filter of
his own need? Does it even matter? Louis de
Bernières was selected as one of the Granta Twenty Best of Young
British Novelists in 1993. Captain Corelli's Mandolin, his fourth
novel, won the Commonwealth Writers' Prize, Best Book, 1995, selling
2.8 million copies. Since then he's published two more novels, Red Dog
(2001) and Birds Without Wings which was shortlisted for the 2004
Whitbread Novel Award. Judges: "An
elegant love story about the lies we tell ourselves and why we have
to." Charlie Weir is a
man who tackles other people's demons for a living. He has seen every
kind of trauma during his years as a psychiatrist in New York City, and
yet hasn't found a way to resolve the conflicts within his own family.
And he has never overcome the terrible blunder seven years before which
lost him his wife and daughter, leaving him prone to corrosive
loneliness and restless anger. When Walt introduces Charlie to Nora
Chiara, they fall for each other quickly but their bliss is
short-lived. Her vulnerability, once so irresistible, begins to sour
their life together. As he probes at the source of her distress, a
half-memory from deep in his own unconscious mind begins to arouse a
horrifying suspicion... Patrick McGrath
is the author of a short story collection, and six previous novels
including Asylum, Martha Peake, Port Mungo and Spider which was made
into a film in 2002 by acclaimed director David Cronenberg. His most
recent book was Ghost Town, a volume of novellas about New York.
Patrick McGrath lives in London and New York. Judges: "A
riveting story about what makes us who we are by a truly accomplished
novelist."
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