Virtual Costa Book Awards Part 1: Adèle Geras and guests

It's my great pleasure to introduce Writers Review's Virtual Costa Book Awards. We were very sad indeed to hear that the real life Costa Book Awards are no more, so we decided to set up our very own Virtual Awards. Over the next three weeks, we're putting up recommendations for the awards from some friends of Writers Review. You'll find my choice at the end of this selection from some wonderful writers. I hope they lead you to read lots of books you will enjoy.

Merry Christmas from us all!  Adèle Geras

KATIE FFORDE nominates Jane Bailey's Sorrow isn't Good Enough for the Virtual Best Novel Prize:

Jane Bailey's writing is clear and easy to read and we instantly connect to the heroine, Stephanie, both in the present day and in the past. Few people write from a child's point of view as well as Jane and the little girl she describes, desperate for love, aware of life's unfairness but accepting it nonetheless, is entirely convincing.

With her we travel back to the Sixties, a simpler, crueller time for children. No wonder there is a darker side to this coming of age story. We learn about the tragedy on the first page: the notorious murder of Stephanie's best friend. But friendship is complicated; not what it seems from a distance.

This is not always a comfortable novel but one I couldn't turn away from. Jane Bailey is a writer who should be known to more people. She is so good.

VAL McDERMID nominates Ali Smith's Companion Piece for the Virtual Costa Novel Prize:

This novel is the coda to Smith's Four Seasons quartet. She carries the reader along in a broad and diverse narrative sweep and produces a vivid portrait of contemporary life. She writes beautifully but although she shines a light on the worst things we do to each other, her work is imbued with hope. Somehow, while firmly rooted in the real world, she can be surreal and dreamlike at times.

Companion Piece is intelligent, compassionate and often very funny. I found it exhilarating. With her books, when I reach the end I always want to go back to the beginning and do it all again. But with Companion Piece, I felt compelled to go back to Autumn, the beginning of the Seasons quartet and read all five again. And I'm glad I did.

WENDY COPE nominates My Phantoms by Geraldine Riley for the Virtual Costa Novel Prize:

I've just finished this. It is a brilliantly readable study of the relationship between a daughter and her sad, inadequate and often infuriating mother. Much of the time the daughter distances herself and is sometimes unkind. When she agrees to see her mother and to help her when she's ill, her attempts at forming a relationship more satisfying to both of them meet with little success. Their encounters are often funny as well as painful. The book is only 199 pages long and it left me wanting more.

SOPHIE HANNAH nominates Ignore it all and hope it goes away by Nic Aubury for the Virtual Costa Poetry Prize:

Ignore it all and hope it goes away should win every poetry prize going. It is wise, witty, moving, memorable, and displays prosodic dexterity that one very rarely sees these days. It also has the most wonderful illustrations by genius cartoonist Moose Allain.

MICHAEL ARDITTI nominates Donal Ryan's The Queen of Dirt Island  for the Virtual Costa Novel Prize:

I have been particularly taken with Irish fiction this year, including Audrey Magee's The Colony and Emma Donahue's Haven, but the pick of the crop for me is Donal Ryan''s The Queen of Dirt Island. It tells of three (ultimately four) generations of women in rural Tipperary, whose menfolk are either dead, weak, absent or treacherous. In a series of short, almost self-contained chapters, Ryan tells of family love and loyalty, which endures hardship, prejudice, illegitimacy and suicide. Opening in the 1980s, both republicanism and a repressive clergy inevitably feature, but the focus is on the domestic, and often fractious but always nurturing home that the women share. Ryan's writing is by turns sharp, funny, lyrical and tinges with a winning melancholy, and when, in a metafictional twist, we learn that it's also the writing of Saoirse, the novel's central character, we can only cheer at her triumph over the odds.

AMANDA CRAIG nominates Sally Gardner's The Weather Woman for the Virtual Costa Novel Prize.

The Weather Woman reads like Georgette Heyer crossed with Angela Carter, being historical, magical, gorgeously written and pulsing with romantic energy. Its heroine Neva is born with an extraordinary gift: she can predict the weather at any given date. In Regency England, when society is obsessed by gambling, this is a gift that can make or break immense fortunes, so her clockmaker father conceals her in an automaton.

However, Neva is also thirsty for an education, something forbidden to women. She dresses as a man, and soon falls in love with Henri, a charismatic young French count who shares her poverty and her undeclared passion. From its opening at a Frost Fair to its climactic struggle against villainy, it is packed with drama, but it also contains a beautiful description of what making love as equals should be like.

JUDITH LENNOX nominates This is not a Pity Memoir by Abi Morgan for the Virtual Costa Biography Prize:

Screenwriter Abi Morgan comes home from buying sushi to find her partner Jacob unconscious on the bathroom floor. His seizure marks the onset of a devastating illness. He is put into an induced coma from which he emerges months later, fragile and unravelled, unable to recognise Abi, convinced she’s an imposter.

The everyday continues – taxes must be paid, scripts completed, sometimes at midnight - though life is now irrevocably divided into BC (before collapse) and AD (after disaster). Morgan’s memoir has the urgency of a thriller and is written with honesty and humour, brilliantly describing her fluctuating emotions and the exhaustion of hope and despair. Though the story is tragic, it’s never depressing, as Morgan learns to live for ‘daily glimmers of happiness,’ and they emerge into a strange new world, traumatised and altered but held together by love.

ADELE GERAS nominates The Whalebone Theatre by Joanna Quinn for the Virtual Costa First Novel Prize:

The Whalebone Theatre is a most accomplished debut. It's a family story starting before the Second World War and covering many events familiar from other novels. What marks this book out is the characters of the siblings at the heart of the action, brought together to deal with everything the world can throw at them. The eponymous Theatre   (the remains of a carcass washed up on the Devon coast) becomes the heart of the several interlocking stories.  I love "let's do the show right here" novels and this is a hugely enjoyable example of the genre.

Click here for Part 2 ...