Shortlist for the 2007 Costa Novel Award
(150 entries)
Skin Lane by Neil Bartlett (Serpent's
Tail)
At 47, Mr. F's working life on London's Skin Lane is one governed by calm,
precision and routine. So when he starts to have frightening, recurring
nightmares, he does his best to ignore them; after all, he's a perfectly
ordinary middle-aged man. As London's crooked backstreets begin to swelter
in the long, hot summer of 1967, Mr. F's nightmare becomes an obsession. A
chance encounter adds a face to the body that nightly haunts him, and the
torments of his sweat-drenched nights lead him deeper into a terrifying
labyrinth of rage, desire and shame.
To read the Category Judges' review of this book click here.
Day by A.L. Kennedy (Jonathan
Cape)
Alfred Day wanted his war. In its turmoil he found his proper purpose as the
tail-gunner in a Lancaster bomber; he found the wild, dark fellowship of his
crew, and he found Joyce, a woman to love. But that's all gone now - the war
took it away. Now, in 1949, Alfred is winding back time to see where he lost
himself. He has taken the role of an extra in a POW film. Shipped out to Germany
and an ersatz camp, he picks his way through the clich?s that will become all
that's left of his war and begins to do what he's never dared - to remember. He
is looking for some semblance of hope: trying to move forward by going back.
To read the Category Judges' review of this book click here.
Death of a Murderer by Rupert Thomson
(Bloomsbury)
Towards the end of November 2002, Billy Tyler, a seasoned police constable in
his mid-forties, is summoned to the mortuary of a hospital in Suffolk. For the
next twelve hours, from seven in the evening till seven in the morning, he is
responsible for guarding the body of the notorious child-killer, Myra Hindley.
Billy's approach is utterly professional, but as the night wears on, in the
eerie silence of the hospital, the dead woman's presence begins to assert
itself, and Billy's own problems and anxieties gradually acquire a new and
unexpected significance.
To read the Category Judges' review of this book click here.
The Road Home by Rose Tremain (Chatto
& Windus)
Lev is on his way from Eastern Europe to Britain, seeking work. Lev begins
with no job, little money and few words of English. He has only his memories,
his hopes and a flair for preparing food. Behind him loom the figures of his
dead wife, his beloved daughter and his outrageous friend Rudi. Now, in front of
Lev, lies the deep strangeness of the British: their hostile streets, their
clannish pubs, their obsession with celebrity, and their lonely flats. London
holds out the alluring possibilities of friendship, sex, money and a new career;
but, more than this, of human understanding and a sense of belonging.
To read the Category Judges' review of this book click here.
Shortlist for the 2007 Costa First Novel
Award (80 entries)
A Golden Age by Tahmima Anam (John
Murray)
As Rehana Haque awakes one March morning, she might be forgiven for feeling
happy. Today she will throw a party for her son and daughter. In the garden of
the house she has built, her roses are blooming; her children are almost
grown-up; and beyond their doorstep, the city is buzzing with excitement after
recent elections. Change is in the air. But none of the guests at Rehana's party
can foresee what will happen in the days and months that follow. For this is
East Pakistan in 1971, a country on the brink of war, and this family's life is
about to change forever. As she struggles to keep her family safe, Rehana will
find herself faced with a heartbreaking dilemma.
To read the Category Judges' review of this book click here.
What Was Lost by Catherine O'Flynn
(Tindal Street Press)
A lost little girl with her notebook and toy monkey appears on the CCTV
screens of the Green Oaks shopping centre, evoking memories of junior detective,
Kate Meaney, missing for 20 years. Kurt, a security guard with a sleep disorder
and Lisa, a disenchanted deputy manager at Your Music, follow her through the
centre's endless corridors - welcome relief from customers, colleagues and the
Green Oaks mystery shopper. But, as this after-hours friendship grows in
intensity, it brings new loss and new longing to light.
To read the Category Judges' review of this book click here.
Gifted by Nikita Lalwani (Viking)
At fourteen, Rumi is firmly set on the path of a gifted child, speeding
headlong towards Oxford University. As her father sees it, discipline is
everything if the family has any hope of making its mark on its adoptive
country. However, as Rumi gets older and the family's stark isolation
intensifies, numbers start to lose their magic for the young teenager: she
abandons the rigid timetable of her afternoons to seek out friendship and
replaces equations with rampant spice abuse. As her longing for love and
her parents' will to succeed deepen, so too does the rift between
generations.
To read the Category Judges' review of this book click here.
Mosquito by Roma Tearne (Harper
Press)
When Theo returns to his native Sri Lanka after his wife's death, he hopes to
escape his loss amidst the lush landscape of his increasingly war-torn
country. But as he gives himself up to life in his beautiful, tortured
land, he finds himself slipping into friendship with an artistic young girl,
Nulani - a friendship that blossoms into love. Under the threat of civil
war, as the quiet coastal town fills with whispers and suspicions, their affair
offers a glimmer of hope to a country on the brink of destruction. But all
too soon, the violence which has cast an ominous shadow over their love
explodes. No one, it seems, is safe and ultimately, each of them will be tested
in the most terrible ways.
To read the Category Judges' review of this book click here.
Shortlist for the 2007 Costa Biography
Award (113 entries)
Rudolf Nureyev by Julie Kavanagh (Fig
Tree)
Ballet's first pop icon, Rudolf Nureyev, revolutionised an old artform,
bringing a new young audience to opera houses and sparking Rudimania across the
globe. From his birth on a train in Siberia at the height of Stalin's
terrors, Nureyev's life was extraordinary. This definitive biography of one of
the most iconic figures of the twentieth century, ten years in the making, draws
on previously unseen letters, diaries and home-movie footage to give an
intimate, revealing and dramatic picture of this dazzling and complex figure.
To read the Category Judges' review of this book click here.
Agent Zigzag by Ben Macintyre
(Bloomsbury)
Agent Zigzag is the untold story of Britain's most extraordinary wartime
double agent; Eddie Chapman. Chapman was a dashing, louche, courageous and
unpredictable man whose talents led to a single end: breaking the rules. This
was a man who courted contradictions as much as he courted adventure. Inside the
traitor was a hero; inside the villain, a man of conscience; the problem for
Chapman, his spymasters and his many lovers, was to know where one ended and the
other began.
To read the Category Judges' review of this book click here.
Young Stalin by Simon Sebag Montefiore
(Weidenfeld & Nicolson)
Stalin, like Hitler, remains the personification of evil but also one of the
creators of today's world. Based on massive research and astonishing new
evidence in archives from Moscow to Georgia, Young Stalin is a
chronicle of the Revolution, a pre-history of the USSR and an intimate biography
unveiling the shadowy, adventurous journey of the Georgian cobbler's son who was
to become the Red Tsar.
To read the Category Judges' review of this book click here.
Fatty Batter by Michael Simkins (Ebury
Press)
Fatty Batter is the story of one man's lifelong obsession with
cricket. From his earliest awkward days as a fat schoolboy, to his years
running a team of dysfunctional inadequates, cricket has offered Michael Simkins
a shelter from life's irksome realities and a place in which to quietly
dream. That place is a peculiarly English arcadia of occasional wondrous
beauty, forests of comforting statistics and the endless life-affirming rituals
of defeat, humiliation and disappointment - the perfect practice net for life.
To read the Category Judges' review of this book click here.
Shortlist for the 2007 Costa Poetry Award
(72 entries)
The Speed of Dark by Ian Duhig
(Picador)
The Speed of Dark is structured around Duhig's reworking of the text
of Le Roman de Fauvel, a medieval satire that railed against the
corruption of the twelfth-century French court and Church. In Duhig's version
however, the tale of the power-mad horse-king Fauvel gains a terrifying and
contemporary relevance, and is identified with more recent crusades, crazed
ambitions and insatiable greeds.
To read the Category Judges' review of this book click here.
The Space of Joy by John Fuller (Chatto
& Windus)
The Space of Joy is a sequence of poems that recounts the endless
desire for love - and the failures and compromises which accompany that desire -
in a number of writers and musicians who fatally prioritise their art. If there
is any resolution in this sequence, it is the conviction that while 'poetry may
be the only heaven we have', it is life itself that must create the 'space of
joy' which art wishes to celebrate.
To read the Category Judges' review of this book click here.
Look We Have Coming to Dover! by Daljit
Nagra (Faber and Faber)
Taking in its sights Matthew Arnold's 'land of dreams', Look We Have
Coming to Dover! explores the idealism and reality of a multicultural
Britain. Nagra, whose own parents came to England from the Punjab in the
1950s, conjures a jazzed hybrid language to tell stories of aspiration,
assimilation, alienation and love, from a stowaway's first footprint on Dover
Beach to the disenchantment of subsequent generations.
To read the Category Judges' review of this book click here.
Tilt by Jean Sprackland (Cape
Poetry)
Jean Sprackland's third collection describes a world in freefall. Chaos and
calamity are at our shoulder, in the shape of fire and flood, ice-storm and
hurricane; trains stand still, zoos are abandoned, migrating birds lose their
way - all surfaces are unreliable, all territories unmapped. These poems explore
the ambivalence and dark unease of slippage and collapse, but also carry a
powerful sense of the miraculous made manifest amongst the ordinary.
To read the Category Judges' review of this book click here.
Shortlist for the 2007 Costa Children's
Book Award (138 entries)
The Bower Bird by Ann Kelley (Luath
Press Limited)
Gussie lives in Cornwall and, like most twelve-year-olds, is quickly growing
up. She is also awaiting news of a heart transplant operation. When
Gussie moves from the coast to a new house in town, she rebels, discovers her
ancestors and an interest in photography, falls in love and has parent troubles
- all whilst experiencing general adolescent angst and trying not to wait for
what might never happen.
To read the Category Judges' review of this book click here.
Crusade by Elizabeth Laird (Macmillan
Children's Books)
When Adam's mother dies unconfessed, he pledges to save her soul with dust
from the Holy Land. Employed as a dog-boy for the local knight, Adam grabs the
chance to join the Crusade to reclaim Jerusalem. He burns with determination to
strike down the infidel enemy...
Salim, a merchant's son, is leading an uneventful life in the port of Acre -
until news arrives that a Crusader attack is imminent. To keep Salim safe, his
father buys him an apprenticeship with an esteemed, travelling Jewish doctor.
But Salim's employment leads him to the heart of Sultan Saladin's camp - and
into battle against the barbaric and unholy invaders...
To read the Category Judges' review of this book click here.
What I Was by Meg Rosoff (Puffin
Books)
"I'd been kicked out of two boarding schools and the last thing I wanted was
to be here, on the East Anglian coast, in a third. But without St
Oswald's, I would not have discovered the fisherman's hut with its roaring fire,
its striped blankets and its sea monster stew. Without St Oswald's, I
would not have met the boy with the beautiful eyes, the flickering half-smile
and no past. Without St Oswald's, I wouldn't have met Finn. And without
Finn, there would be no story. Shall we begin?"
To read the Category Judges' review of this book click here.
Blood Red Snow White by Marcus Sedgwick
(Orion Children's Books)
Beyond the vast plains, deep in the snowy forest, the great bear that is
Russia wakes from a long sleep and marches to St Petersburg to claim its
birthright. Its awakening will mark the end for the Romanovs, and herald
an era that will change the world. Another man played a part in it
all. His name was Arthur Ransome, a journalist and writer who left his
English home, his wife and daughter, and fell in love with Russia and a Russian
woman, Evgenia. This is his story.
To read the Category Judges' review of this book and to comment on it
yourself, click here.