Costa Book Awards 2017

I was very excited to see the Costa Book Award Winners last night when they were announced. Congratulations to the authors and publishers who's books were chosen.

Have you read any of these books? I would love to hear your thoughts.

FIRST NOVEL AWARD 2017

Eleanor Oliphant leads a simple life. She wears the same clothes to work every day, eats the same meal deal for lunch every day and buys the same two bottles of vodka to drink every weekend. Eleanor Oliphant is happy. Nothing is missing from her carefully timetabled life. Except, sometimes, everything. One simple act of kindness is about to shatter the walls Eleanor has built around herself. Now she must learn to navigate the world that everyone else seems to take for granted – while searching for the courage to face the dark corners she’s avoided all her life. Change can be good. Change can be bad. But surely anything is better than...fine?

This book is sitting on my shelf waiting to be read. Keep an eye out for my review soon.


NOVEL AWARD WINNER 2017

Midwinter in the early years of this century. A teenage girl on holiday has gone missing in the hills at the heart of England. The villagers are called up to join the search, fanning out across the moors as the police set up roadblocks and a crowd of news reporters descends on their usually quiet home. Meanwhile, there is work that must still be done: cows milked, fences repaired, stone cut, pints poured, beds made, sermons written, a pantomime rehearsed. The search for the missing girl goes on, but so does everyday life. As it must. As the seasons unfold, there are those who leave the village and those who are pulled back; those who come together or break apart. There are births and deaths; secrets kept and exposed; livelihoods made and lost; small kindnesses and unanticipated betrayals.

I am a big fan of Jon McGregor and was fortunate enough to meet him some years ago. I have read this book but did not have an opportunity to write a review of it at the time. I really enjoyed it and I highly recommend this one.

BIOGRAPHY AWARD WINNER 2017

As Rebecca Stott’s father lay dying, he begged her to help him write the memoir he'd been struggling with for years. He wanted to tell the story of their family who for generations had all been members of a fundamentalist Christian sect. Yet each time he reached a certain point, he became tangled in a thicket of painful memories and couldn't go on. The Exclusive Brethren were a closed community who believed the world is ruled by Satan: non-Brethren books were banned, women were made to wear headscarves and those who disobeyed the rules were punished. Rebecca’s father, like her grandfather, had been an influential Brethren Minister: he preached in the ‘Iron Room’ of their meeting houses and made choices that would eventually come to haunt him. Rebecca was born into the Brethren, yet as an intelligent, enquiring child she was always asking dangerous questions. She would discover that her father had been asking them too, and that the fault line between faith and doubt had almost engulfed him.

I have this book on order and cannot wait to read it.

POETRY AWARD WINNER 2017

To be alive is to be inside the wave, always travelling until it breaks and is gone. These poems are concerned with the borderline between the living and the dead – the underworld and the human living world – and the exquisitely intense being of both. They possess a spare, eloquent lyricism as they explore the bliss and anguish of the voyage. 







CHILDREN'S BOOK AWARD WINNER 2017

After crashing hundreds of miles from civilisation in the Amazon rainforest, Fred, Con, Lila and Max are utterly alone and in grave danger. They have no food, no water and no chance of being rescued. But they are alive and they have hope. As they negotiate the wild jungle they begin to find signs that something - someone - has been there before them. Could there possibly be a way out after all?