Last Minute Christmas Presents? Costa Book Awards Shortlist 2013

And it's that time of year again when probably my favourite book awards of the year announce their shortlist - the Costa Book Awards. Saying 'this time of year', I am embarrassingly slow in posting about them as they were announced weeks ago...

Anyhow, it's not Christmas yet so there's still plenty of time to consult this year's shortlist and make notes on potential Christmas gifts.

2013 Costa Novel Award shortlist

Kate Atkinson for Life After Life (Doubleday)

What if you had the chance to live your life again and again, until you finally got it right?

During a snowstorm in England in 1910, a baby is born and dies before she can take her first breath.

What if there were second chances? And third chances? In fact an infinite number of chances to live your life? Would you eventually be able to save the world from its own inevitable destiny? And would you even want to?

Life After Life follows Ursula Todd as she lives through the turbulent events of the last century again and again. With wit and compassion, Kate Atkinson finds warmth even in life's bleakest moments, and shows an extraordinary ability to evoke the past. Here she is at her most profound and inventive, in a novel that celebrates the best and worst of ourselves.

Bernardine Bishop for Unexpected Lessons in Love (John Murray)

Cecilia Banks has a great deal on her plate. But when her son Ian turns up on her doostep with the unexpected consequence of a brief fling, she feels she has no choice but to take the baby into her life. Cephas's arrival is the latest of many challenges Cecilia has to face. There is the matter of her cancer, for a start, an illness shared with her novelist friend Helen. Then there is Helen herself, whose observations of Cecilia's family life reveal a somewhat ambivalent attitude to motherhood. Meanwhile Tim, Cecilia's husband, is taking self-effacement to extremes, and Ian, unless he gets on with it, will throw away his best chance at happiness.

Cecilia, however, does not have to manage alone. In a convent in Hastings sits Sister Diana Clegg who holds the ties that bind everyone not only to each other, but to strangers as yet unmet. As events unfold and as the truth about Cephas is revealed, we are invited to look closely at madness, guilt, mortal dread and the gift of resilience. No one will remain unchanged.

'Frank, courageous and entertaining. I felt better for reading it' Margaret Drabble

Maggie O’Farrell for Instructions for a Heatwave (Tinder Press)

It's July 1976. In London, it hasn't rained for months, gardens are filled with aphids, water comes from a standpipe, and Robert Riordan tells his wife Gretta that he's going round the corner to buy a newspaper. He doesn't come back. The search for Robert brings Gretta's children - two estranged sisters and a brother on the brink of divorce - back home, each wih different ideas as to where their father might have gone. None of them suspects that their mother might have an explanation that even now she cannot share.

Evie Wyld for All the Birds, Singing (Jonathan Cape)

Jake Whyte is the sole resident of an old farmhouse on an unnamed British island, a place of ceaseless rains and battering winds. It's just her, her untamed companion, Dog, and a flock of sheep. Which is how she wanted it to be. But something is coming for the sheep - every few nights it picks one off, leaves it in rags.

It could be anything. There are foxes in the woods, a strange boy and a strange man, rumours of an obscure, formidable beast. And there is Jake's unknown past, perhaps breaking into the present, a story hidden thousands of miles away and years ago, in a landscape of different colour and sound, a story held in the scars that stripe her back.

2013 Costa First Novel Award shortlist

Sam Byers for Idiopathy (Fourth Estate)

Katherine has given up trying to be happy. Her cynical wit repels the people she wants to attract, and attracts the people she knows she should repel. Her ex Daniel, meanwhile, isn’t sure that he loves his new girlfriend. But somehow not telling her he loves her has become synonymous with telling her that he doesn’t love her, meaning that he has to tell her he loves her just to maintain the status quo.

When their former friend Nathan returns from a stint in a psychiatric ward to find that his mother has transformed herself into bestselling author and Twitter sensation ‘Mother Courage’ – Katherine, Daniel and Nathan decide to meet to heal old wounds. But will a reunion end well? Almost certainly not.

Both scathing invective on a self-obsessed generation and moving account of love and loneliness, ‘Idiopathy’ skewers everything from militant environmentalists to self-help quackery and announces the arrival of a savagely funny talent.

Kate Clanchy for Meeting the English (Picador)
Literary Giant seeks young man to push bathchair. Own room in Hampstead, all found, exciting cultural milieu. Modest wage. Ideal 'gap year' opportunity. Apply Prys Box 4224XXC. 'It's only England,' said Mr Fox, 'just a few hours on the train. You can always come home.' 'Ah've never been though,' said Struan, 'never been South.' 'Then you should,' said Mr Fox, 'you really should.' So it is that Struan Robertson, orphan, genius, and just seventeen, leaves his dour native town of Cuik, and arrives in London in the freakish fine summer of 1989. His job, he finds, is to care for Phillip, dumbfounded and paralysed by a massive stroke, because, though two teenage children, two wives, and a literary agent all rattle round Phillip's large house, they are each too busy with their peculiar obsessions to do it themselves. As the city bakes, Struan finds himself tangled in a midsummer's dream of mistaken identity, giddying property prices, wild swimming, and overwhelming passions. For everyone, it is to be a life-changing summer. This is a bright book about dark subjects: a tale about kindness and its limits, told with love. Spiked with witty dialogue, and jostling with gleeful, zesty characters, it is a glorious debut novel from an acclaimed writer of poetry, non-fiction, and short stories.

Nathan Filer for The Shock of the Fall (HarperCollins)

‘I’ll tell you what happened because it will be a good way to introduce my brother. His name’s Simon. I think you’re going to like him. I really do. But in a couple of pages he’ll be dead. And he was never the same after that.’

There are books you can’t stop reading, which keep you up all night.

There are books which let us into the hidden parts of life and make them vividly real.

There are books which, because of the sheer skill with which every word is chosen, linger in your mind for days.

The Shock of the Fall is all of these books.

The Shock of the Fall is an extraordinary portrait of one man’s descent into mental illness. It is a brave and groundbreaking novel from one of the most exciting new voices in fiction.

Sathnam Sanghera for Marriage Material (William Heinemann)

If you've approached Bains Stores recently, you'd be forgiven for hesitating on doing so. A prominent window advert for a discontinued chocolate bar suggests the shop may have closed in 1994. The security shutters are stuck a quarter-open, adding to the general air of dilapidation. A push or kick of the door triggers something which is more grating car alarm than charming shop bell.

To Arjan Banga, returning to the Black Country after the unexpected death of his father, his family's corner shop represents everything he has tried to leave behind - a lethargic pace of life, insular rituals and ways of thinking. But when his mother insists on keeping the shop open, he finds himself being dragged back, forced into big decisions about his imminent marriage back in London and uncovering the history of his broken family - the elopement and mixed-race marriage of his aunt Surinder, the betrayals and loyalties, loves and regrets that have played out in the shop over more than fifty years.

Taking inspiration from Arnold Bennett's classic novel The Old Wives' Tale, Marriage Material tells the story of three generations of a family through the prism of a Wolverhampton corner shop - itself a microcosm of the South Asian experience in the country: a symbol of independence and integration, but also of darker realities.

This is an epic tale of family, love, and politics, spanning the second half of the twentieth century, and the start of the twenty-first. Told with humour, tenderness and insight, it manages to be both a unique and urgent survey of modern Britain by one of Britain's most promising young writers, and an ingenious reimagining of a classic work of fiction.

2013 Costa Biography Award shortlist

Gavin Francis for Empire Antarctica: Ice, Silence & Emperor Penguins (Chatto & Windus)

Empire Antarctica is the story of one man and his fascination with the world's loneliest continent, as well as the emperor penguins who weather the winter with him. This is travel writing at its very best.

Thomas Harding for Hanns and Rudolf: The German Jew and the Hunt for the Kommandant of Auschwitz (William Heinemann)

The extraordinary true story of the Jewish investigator who pursued and captured one of Nazi Germany's most notorious war criminals.

Lucy Hughes-Hallett for The Pike: Gabriele D’Annunzio, Poet, Seducer and Preacher of War (Fourth Estate)

In September 1919 Gabriele D’Annunzio, successful poet and occasional politician, declared himself Commandante of the city of Fiume in modern day Croatia. His intention – to establish a utopia based on his fascist and artistic ideals. It was the dramatic pinnacle to an outrageous career.

Lucy Hughes-Hallett charts the controversial life of D’Annunzio, the debauched artist who became a national hero. His evolution from idealist Romantic to radical right-wing revolutionary is a political parable. Through his ideological journey, culminating in the failure of the Fiume endeavour, we witness the political turbulence of early 20th century Europe and the emergence of fascism.

In ‘The Pike’, Hughes-Hallett addresses the cult of nationalism and the origins of political extremism – and at the centre of the book stands the charismatic D’Annunzio: a figure as deplorable as he is fascinating.

Olivia Laing for The Trip to Echo Spring: Why Writers Drink (Canongate)

Why is it that some of the greatest works of literature have been produced by writers in the grip of alcoholism, an addiction that cost them personal happiness and caused harm to those who loved them? In The Trip to Echo Spring, Olivia Laing examines the link between creativity and alcohol through the work and lives of six extraordinary men: F. Scott Fitzgerald, Ernest Hemingway, Tennessee Williams, John Berryman, John Cheever and Raymond Carver.

All six of these writers were alcoholics, and the subject of drinking surfaces in some of their finest work, from Cat on a Hot Tin Roof to A Moveable Feast. Often they did their drinking together - Hemingway and Fitzgerald ricocheting through the cafés of 1920s Paris; Carver and Cheever speeding to the liquor store in Iowa in the icy winter of 1973.

Olivia Laing grew up in an alcoholic family herself. One spring, wanting to make sense of this ferocious, entangling disease, she took a journey across America that plunged her into the heart of these overlapping lives. As she travels from Cheever's New York to Williams' New Orleans, from Hemingway's Key West to Carver's Port Angeles, she pieces together a topographical map of alcoholism, from the horrors of addiction to the miraculous possibilities of recovery. 

Beautiful, captivating and original, The Trip to Echo Spring strips away the myth of the alcoholic writer to reveal the terrible price creativity can exert.

2013 Costa Poetry Award shortlist

Clive James for Dante, The Divine Comedy (Picador)

The Divine Comedy is the precursor of modern literature, and Clive James’s new translation – his life’s work and decades in the making – presents Dante’s entire epic poem in a single song. While many poets and translators have attempted to capture the full glory of The Divine Comedy in English, many have fallen short. Victorian verse translations established an unfortunate tradition of reproducing the sprightly rhyming measures of Dante but at the same time betraying the strain on the translator’s powers of invention. For Dante, the dramatic human stories of Hell were exciting, but the spiritual studies of Purgatory and the sublime panoramas of Heaven were no less so. In this incantatory new translation, James – defying the convention by writing in quatrains – tackles these problems head-on and creates a striking and hugely accessible translation that gives us The Divine Comedy as a whole, unified, and dramatic work.

Helen Mort for Division Street (Chatto & Windus)

From the clash between striking miners and police to the delicate conflicts in personal relationships, Helen Mort's stunning debut is marked by distance and division. Named for a street in Sheffield, this is a collection that cherishes specificity: the particularity of names; the reflections the world throws back at us; the precise moment of a realisation. Distinctive and assured, these poems show us how, at the site of conflict, a moment of reconciliation can be born.

Robin Robertson for Hill of Doors (Picador)

Charged with strangeness and beauty, Hill of Doors is a haunted and haunting book, where each successive poem seems a shape conjured from the shadows, and where the uncanny is made physically present. The collection sees the return of some familiar members of the Robertson company, including Strindberg – heading, as usual, towards calamity – and the shape-shifter Dionysus. Four loose retellings of stories of the Greek god form pillars for the book, alongside four short Ovid versions. Threaded through these are a series of pieces about the poet’s childhood on the north-east coast, his fascination with the sea and the islands of Scotland. However, the reader will also discover a distinct new note in Robertson’s austere but ravishing poetry: towards the possibility of contentment – a house, a door, a key – finding, at last, a ‘happiness of the hand and heart’. Magisterial in its command and range, indelibly moving and memorable in its speech, Hill of Doors is Robin Robertson’s most powerful book to date.

Michael Symmons Roberts for Drysalter (Jonathan Cape)

A new poetry collection from the award-winning writer of Corpus and Edgelands. Winner of the 2013 Forward Poetry Prize for Best Collection and shortlisted for the 2013 T.S. Eliot Poetry Prize and 2013 Costa Poetry Award.

2013 Costa Children’s Book Award shortlist

Ross Montgomery for Alex, the Dog and the Unopenable Door (Faber and Faber)

Alex Jennings is a boy with a problem.

His mum's sent him away to boarding school because his father, the most famously failed explorer in the history of the Cusp, has escaped from hospital again, yelling 'squiggles'.

Make that two problems.

Now the evil Davidus Kyte and all his henchmen are after Alex, convinced he alone knows the meaning of the word 'squiggles'.

OK, make that three -

Alex Jennings is a boy with a lot of problems. But with the help of a talking dog and a girl with unfeasibly sharp teeth, he just might have what it takes to cross the Forbidden Lands, escape the evil Davidus Kyte, and find out what lies beyond the Cusp . . .

Sarah Naughton for The Hanged Man Rises (Simon and Schuster)

When their parents are killed in a fire, Titus Adams and his little sister Hannah are left to fend for themselves in the cruel and squalid slums of Victorian London. Taking shelter with his friend and saviour, Inspector Pilbury, Titus should feel safe. But though the inspector has just caught and hung a notorious child-murderer, the murders haven't stopped. Now everyone is a suspect, even the inspector himself, and unless Titus can find a way to end the killings, he will lose all that is dear to him. For this evil cannot be contained, even by death.

Chris Riddell for Goth Girl and the Ghost of a Mouse (Macmillan Children’s Books)

Ada Goth is the only child of Lord Goth. The two live together in the enormous Ghastly-Gorm Hall. Lord Goth believes that children should be heard and not seen, so Ada has to wear large clumpy boots so that he can always hear her coming. This makes it hard for her to make friends and, if she's honest, she's rather lonely. Then one day William and Emily Cabbage come to stay at the house, and together with a ghostly mouse called Ishmael they and Ada begin to unravel a dastardly plot that Maltravers, the mysterious indoor gamekeeper, is hatching. Ada and her friends must work together to foil Maltravers before it's too late!

Elizabeth Wein for Rose Under Fire (Electric Monkey)
The thrilling story of one young ATA pilot’s unforgettable journey through World War Two. This is Rose Under Fire. Rose Justice is a young American ATA pilot, delivering planes and taxiing pilots for the RAF in the UK during the summer of 1944. A budding poet who feels most alive while flying, she discovers that not all battles are fought in the air. An unforgettable journey from innocence to experience from the author of the best-selling, multi-award-nominated Code Name Verity. From the exhilaration of being the youngest pilot in the British air transport auxiliary, to the aftermath of surviving the notorious Ravensbruck women’s concentration camp, Rose’s story is one of courage in the face of adversity. Elizabeth Wein is fast growing into one of the most important names in historical books for young adults. In this, her second book for Egmont Press, she explores a World War 2 story of great significance and harrowing consequences. Something made more haunting by the backdrop of the real-life events of Nazi Germany

The RSC's Richard II

Richard is King. A monarch ordained by God to lead his people. But he is also a man of very human weakness. A man whose vanity threatens to divide the great houses of England and drag his people into a dynastic civil war that will last 100 years.

I do love Shakespeare, there's some weird loyalty thing still lurking around from my A-Level days or maybe even earlier. I also feel I've worked hard to get to the stage where I can actually appreciate him. Years and years of not understanding a single thing and now when I understand a whole scene without Spark or York Notes to help me, I still feel shamefully gleeful and normally end up whispering to the person next to me 'I toootally just understood that' to which I normally receive a polite smile of the 'there, there' variety.

So last week I was, very luckily, invited to see Richard II at The Barbican. I'd never read or scene the play before, which normally means I end up doing a quick wiki search beforehand to check the rough plot. This time.. I forgot.

Thankfully, though, the RSC are really very good at putting on Shakespeare, who'd have thought it?? No X Factor props or mad dancers, just stripped back as it should be with a few clever set-pieces and lighting to transform the stage from scene to scene. As a result, it's really easy to follow the plot as the play in itself is quite simple.

David Tennant lived up to his great reputation in the title role. On the surface I thought the role was pretty simple, a King seemingly powerful but in reality a bit of a damp squib, but the different levels on which Richard has to connect with the audience is perhaps a little more extensive than I originally gave him credit. Act IV Scene I when Richard is summoned to personally abdicate the crown requires quite a dramatic contrast of humour, nostalgia, naivety, embarrassment, theatricality, sorrow and also fear, and Tennant completely nailed them all. He may not be quite as pretty as Jude Law and the play may not be as famous or as dramatic as Henry V, but David Tennant can sure act and has a considerably better head of hair in this as you can see. Luscious. (sorry Jude, I do still love you)

So in short, before I start rambling off on pretentious tangents, if you were thinking of going to see the RSC's Richard II, and can get yourself some tickets, definitely go. This is the first play in the RSC's new series of Shakespeare's Histories directed by Gregory Doran.

Twitter: Literature's Friend or Foe?

The internet is always the 'bad guy' when it comes to books. Google Books and Amazon's 'Look Inside' feature and a number of online literature sites mean that there is a scary amount of writing available for free online, made all the worse by pirate website selling electronic editions for free or at a price but with no royalties going to the author. Furthermore, there has been criticism that Amazon's Kindle Direct Publishing means that there is no longer a filter and that "poorer quality" manuscripts (defining that might be tricky...) are selling more than books sold through the traditional process because the price of the former so heavily undercuts the price of the latter, many of them going up for free to attract attention.

There's no denying that there's a problem and one that publishing communities around the world are trying to lobby against but with the bad stuff, there are more opportunities out there for writers than ever before. Twitter is the ultimate free promotional tool. Everyone is using it, whether its passively, actively or somewhere in-between, meaning authors and their publicity teams have immediate access to a large number of consumers at any one time creating what I like to call, the E.L. James Effect. Of course the offering free samples and distributing them widely aspect of the internet is nothing new; it's an age-old marketing tool that the web only makes easier.

One question of course is whether or not Twitter and its social media friends actually "degrade" writing in themselves - firstly, by helping make literature so quickly consumable (be that through either lack of quantity or "quality"), and secondly, by encouraging misuse and disregard of language in preference of brevity or, more commonly, compactness.

To be honest, I think I need to take a step back as I'm getting perilously close to referring to tweets as "literature" but some people have beaten me to it: "Twitterature" has been born... People have taken it upon themselves to thrust upon the world (thrust being the key word in the case of the large amounts of erotica surfacing on the web) 140-character, bite-sized nuggets of their own literary musings, poetry, novel extracts etc. How kind. There's even been a book on the phenomenon: Twitterature: The World's Greatest Books Re-told through Twitter by Alexander Aciman and Emmett Rensin, although the concept of literature on twitterature on literature makes my brain hurt a little...

While I'm not quite there yet with the whole 'tweets as literature' argument, we are no doubt swiftly becoming a faster-paced society that is constantly consuming, be it books or otherwise (Belgian chocolate waffle sandwiches in my case), and Twitter surely echoes that move in its briefness, quantity, immediacy and international scale. I guess it once again we're asking the famous question - what's more important: substance or style, quality or quantity?

Book Club: Diary of a Nobody

Mr Pooter is an office clerk and upright family man in a dull 1880s suburb. His diary is a wonderful portrait of the class system and the inherent snobbishness of the suburban middle classes. It sends up contemporary crazes for Aestheticism, spiritualism and bicycling, as well as the fashion for publishing diaries by anybody and everybody.

The Diary of a Nobody by George & Weedon Grossmith is just that... a diary of a nobody. Mr Pooter, as per the blurb and title is an ordinary middle-class, white male - there's nothing particularly special about him and nothing out of the ordinary really happens.

As a result, I can't really decide what my final thought is on this book. I can't say there was an amazing twist or a unusual character or even exquisite writing because its whole purpose was to be anything but extraordinary. For this reason, the characters aren't particularly likeable; they are all realistically flawed and some are on the cusp of caricatures that Grossmith puppets, largely to poke fun at the middle classes.

What I really liked about the novel was the humour, exposing the ridiculous in the banalities of everyday life and the eccentricity and honesty of our own internal dialogues. I couldn't help but laugh every time Pooter relayed an occasion when he delivered a truly exceptional joke, especially when it's clear from his diary that no one around him found it that funny... story of my life.

The satirical aspects did keep me reading but did it do quite enough to make this an exceptional reading experience? Not really, but being original serialised in 1892, it's not surprising I didn't relate entirely. Saying that, there are, surprisingly, still some relevant social observations in this novel for the modern reader.

As an exploration of the 'ordinary man', this novel reminded me quite a bit of Dickens' Sketches by Boz, helped I'm sure by the similar line drawings that illustrate Pooter's diary throughout. Also,The Diary of a Nobody, like a number of Dickens' works, was first published as a serial in Punch magazine. I couldn't say that this was quite as intricate as anything of Dickens' but, despite being a little dry (as is inevitable when focussing a whole book on the 'diary of a nobody'...) it should probably be read.

I give it a 5/10

What does this tell us about the state of the world?

Bet you were thinking wow, this blog's gone a bit intellectual, a bit philosophical one might even say. Afraid that day hasn't come quite yet. The title of this blog post refers to the news revealed a couple of days ago about the Oxford English Dictionary Word of 2013 being awarded to... the "Selfie".

Dear dear dear. Flashing images of my 13 year-old self desperately trying to catch myself in the frame as I my camera out in front of my trying to create a suitable "selfie" (sorry I just can't not use quote marks for this word..." for my myspace page. You know, the kind that says intelligent but not dull, pretty but not sexy, not self-conscious but not narcissistic either. If I could talk to my 13 year-old self I would tell her right now. 1) Not possible, honey. 2) STOP TAKING PHOTOS OF YOURSELF and 3) If you are going to take photos of yourself, wait a few years when they invent cameras on the front of your phone so you don't look like even more of a moron taking the photo as you do posting it to your facespacewitter page.

Nice little wordy nugget for you there. I'll leave you with this bewildering yet genius article highlighting some of the other words that have made it into the OED hall of fame - and yes, "twerking" is there. All I can say is thank you OED for providing me a distributable link for the next time someone asks me what it means... scarred. for. life. OED words 2013

Victor Hugo and Vianden

One of the reasons I've been so pathetic with my blog this November, other than just being extremely important and busy obviously, is that I have been off inter-railing. Translated that basically means taking a lot of trains. In Europe. And essentially spending a whole lot less time reading and a whole lot more time cycling like a moron around poor unsuspecting European cities, eating an embarrassing amount of stroopwafel, filming a Euro-pop music video (don't ask) and consuming a considerable number of beverages.

Right, back to the books. I did read. Hoorah! Excuse me while I congratulate myself... Anyway, what I read and when is not what I'm going to ramble on about this time - that will come later. I have decided instead to ramble on for a couple of paragraphs about a very big literary name and a very small town in a very small country.

What on earth do people do in Luxembourg? It's the question that appeared on everyone's faces when I told them that was one of our stops and it's definitely what I was asking when we strolled around Luxembourg City one Tuesday evening and didn't see a single person for 25 minutes... The answer, it seems, is to get out of the city and get stuck in to the countryside. Luxembourg really is beautiful with its rolling hills, quirky Gothic villages and extensive vineyards and one of the places it is most proud of is Vianden, a small town (with city status it is keen to add) in the North East of the country. It almost seems as if the town itself grows out of the surrounding hills, now turning a beautiful orange and red with autumn, and at the top of this spiraling town, looking down on its citizens from up high is Vianden Castle, a striking, Gothic, Hogwartsy (yes that is an adjective) mansion, stealing the show.

Despite its obvious beauty, charming streets and haunting castle, Vianden could have remained almost entirely unknown were it not for some help from the literary might that was Victor Hugo. The French author best known for his epic Les Miserables stayed in Vianden on several occasions between the years 1862 and 1871 and there is now a museum showcasing some of his works as well as an impressive Rodin sculpture, as you can see in the photo above. Looking up at Vianden castle from the river on a sunny autumn day, it's not hard to see why such a place might inspire artists such as Hugo. During his stays he wrote prose, poetry and drew sketches to capture the town, its atmosphere, its people, bringing it out of the shadows and introducing it to the rest of Europe. Arguably a better legacy than the 1000+ word brick he wrote... I only talk condescendingly because it is my nemesis, staring down on me much like Vianden Castle from my book shelf still unread - the only difference being that I did actually conquer the Castle.. the book is still very much ahead of me.

P.s. I genuinely took these photos myself. That is not a request for compliments (although they will be both gratefully and gracefully received), but merely to show that this town really as beautiful as they say it is. Go see it next time, you know, you find yourself in Luxembourg...

The Bone People by Keri Hulme

Blurb: In a tower on the New Zealand sea lives Kerewin Holmes, part Maori, part European, an artist estranged from her art, a woman in exile from her family. One night her solitude is disrupted by a visitor—a speechless, mercurial boy named Simon, who tries to steal from her and then repays her with his most precious possession. As Kerewin succumbs to Simon's feral charm, she also falls under the spell of his Maori foster father Joe, who rescued the boy from a shipwreck and now treats him with an unsettling mixture of tenderness and brutality. Out of this unorthodox trinity Keri Hulme has created what is at once a mystery, a love story, and an ambitious exploration of the zone where Maori and European New Zealand meet, clash, and sometimes merge. Winner of both a Booker Prize and Pegasus Prize for Literature, The Bone People is a work of unfettered wordplay and mesmerizing emotional complexity.

My bezzie moved to New Zealand this year and for my birthday present she aptly bought me this, The Bone People by Keri Hulme. Hulme was the last New Zealander to win the Man Booker Prize before Eleanor Catton won the esteemed prize this year with her novel, The Luminaries.

I really loved this book. Not necessarily for its literal story or its specific characters, although both were extremely good, but for the tone it set and how I felt reading it, particularly the first half. New Zealand has an extraordinary landscape and has remained, for many, a mystery as Australia normally seems to win the tourists for some reason. This landscape and sense of the unknown comes across in abundance in this novel. With the risk of sounding like the biggest ponce, I'd go as far as saying you could almost feel the waves crashing on the sand - the novel's cover arguably helping me construct this image...

There are three main characters in this novel, all completely different and all adding something to the novel. Kerewin's eccentricity could perhaps have the potential to make her seem caricatured and unbelievable (which fits in with the book itself, which does, in places, touch upon the magically realist...) But despite and because of these slightly odd moments, Hulme has crafted Kerewin (and her world) wonderfully; her grace, her insecurities, her unique mind and her inner-conflicts all come across to create a very full, 'real' person that you can't help feel affection for.

If I had anything negative to say, it would be that I could have done without the author's introduction. As brilliant a writer as she is, she's definitely indulgent. The novel is long, with not much plot - and I liked that - but she's clearly a woman who is difficult to edit. Her preamble felt a little aggressive and a little self-consciously eccentric, which easily winds me up. Saying that, I don't know the woman but I do know her book, and I really loved it.

Punchdrunk: The Drowned Man

Have you ever seen nature inside out? When the sun stands at midday and it's as if the world was going up in flames?

Step into the world of Temple Pictures where the Hollywood studio system meets a forgotten hinterland filled with dreamers who exist at the fringes of the movie industry. Here, celluloid fantasy clings to desperate realism and certainty dissolves into a hallucinatory world.

Inspired by Buchner's fractured masterpiece Woyzeck, this theatrical journey follows its protagonists along the precipice between illusion and reality.

You would be forgiven for thinking wtf does that mean when you read the above blurb for immersive theatre company Punchdrunk's latest spectacle - The Drowned Man. To be honest you would be forgiven for thinking wtf when you get to the end of the entire evening, having absolutely no idea what you just witnessed. But lord this is good.

Call me cynical but normally I'm a little sceptical of people who tell me how much they 'loved' some weird modern arty theatrical performance because I always slightly think they're worried their cool-points will plummet if they say they didn't like it and had no idea what was going on. This time, though, I was intrigued.

For those who don't know, a little summary. Firstly, you all have to put on Venetian-style white masks so that suddenly you become completely anonymous and it's almost impossible to recognise your friends or they you. Once inside, the whole building becomes the dark (quite literally) world of Temple Pictures and its surrounding grounds. It is absolutely vast. 

Floor after floor with different sets, secret passageways, characters' private rooms where you can rummage about their papers and diaries etc, while all the time actors run amongst you playing out scenes. One moment you could be watching a romantic moment between two lovers, before you find yourself in a seedy bar with drunken cowboys threatening each other.

How on earth do you even begin to tackle such a huge project. The answer is of course completely up to you. Some choose to follow an individual character who will, inevitably, introduce you to other people, other floors, other sets as they move around the building. Others follow friends. Some people stick to just a couple of floors and never even find the other sets. Personally I went off on my own. Being the nosey person I am, I went off looking for secret passageways, details written in letters inside characters' dressing rooms, watching random scenes as I came across them. It's a voyeur's dream and I have to say it concerned me a little how easily I slipped into this role...

Sadly I didn't come across many secret passageways... clearly I'm not practiced enough at snooping... but I know some people found themselves whisked away by strange actors desperate to make them famous or being chatted up by a discerning young gentleman...

If you keep wondering around you will eventually discover the bar... completely in the 1940s Hollywood style, you get swept up in the glitz and glamour. It is also the only place in the entire building where you can take off your masks and are allowed to talk to people. Having lost my friends I stumbled across the bar, got myself a glass of wine and found myself getting into deep discussion with a completely random man I'd never met before. There's something so brilliant about that. Like when you're a bit tipsy and get into some weird conversation with a strange person but with all the excitement of the setting and again surrounded by actors carrying on in character. 

The experience is amazing and I would recommend it to anyone but I would give a little advice:

1. Definitely read the brief outline of the play that they hand out in the queue.
2. Don't get too het up with working out the story and what each scene is trying to do because inevitably you will come out with no idea what just happened.
3. For this reason, split up with your friends and then afterwards go for a drink and share your experiences - you can start to then piece together the story a bit more for yourself (or just get really jealous that your friend found a secret passageway through a fridge or trapdoor or some other awesomeness.

Eleanor Catton wins Man Booker Prize

So last year Hilary Mantel set a number of Man Booker Prize records and 2013 has seen two more records broken as 28 year-old Eleanor Catton becomes both the youngest winner of the Man Booker Prize and her book the longest, at 872 pages (I think we can safely say that challenges my 400 page rule...).

Eleanor Catton is the second New Zealander to win the prize. Keri Hulme won in 1985 with her novel, The Bone People - another case of book sat on my shelf that I haven't yet got round to reading.

Catton apparently started writing The Luminaries three years ago and 872 pages later we have a Victorian murder-mystery set during the gold rush:

It is 1866, and Walter Moody has come to make his fortune upon the New Zealand goldfields. On arrival, he stumbles across a tense gathering of twelve local men, who have met in secret to discuss a series of unsolved crimes. A wealthy man has vanished, a whore has tried to end her life, and an enormous fortune has been discovered in the home of a luckless drunk. Moody is soon drawn into the mystery: a network of fates and fortunes that is as complex and exquisitely patterned as the night sky. The Luminaries is an extraordinary piece of fiction. It is full of narrative, linguistic and psychological pleasures, and has a fiendishly clever and original structuring device. Written in pitch-perfect historical register, richly evoking a mid-19th century world of shipping and banking and goldrush boom and bust, it is also a ghost story, and a gripping mystery. It is a thrilling achievement for someone still in her mid-20s, and will confirm for critics and readers that Catton is one of the brightest stars in the international writing firmament.

Catton was up against, as always, a stellar line-up of novels and writers: A Tale for the Time Being by Ruth Ozeki, Harvest by Jim Crace, The Lowland by Jhumpa Lahiri, The Testament of Mary by Colm Toibin and We Need New Names by Noviolet Bulawayo. Although The Luminaries was not the favourite to win (Harvest by Jim Crane was considered the more likely candidate), critics seem to be pleased - that's got to be a first?

2013 marks the end of an era when it comes to the Man Booker Prize. Up until now the prize has been open to Commonwealth countries and Ireland only. Next year they're letting the Americans in... who knows if the Cattons and Mantels can stand up to the likes of Jonathan Franzen and Donna Tartr... we'll see. We'll also see if I ever get round to reading The Luminaries... I do hope so.

Sweet Tooth by Ian McEwan

The year is 1972. The Cold War is far from over. Britain is being torn apart by industrial unrest and terrorism. Serena Frome, in her final year at Cambridge, is being groomed for MI5.

Serena is sent on a secret mission - Operation Sweet Tooth - which brings her into the world of Tom Haley, a promising young writer. First she loves his stories, then she begins to love the man. Can she maintain the fiction of her undercover life? And who is inventing whom? To answer these questions, Serena must abandon the first rule of espionage - trust no one.

Sweet Tooth is the latest novel from Booker-winner Ian McEwan. All the things we love about McEwan are in this book - strong character voice, a couple of clever twists and turns to keep things moving, an intellectual narrative and beautiful writing. I have to say, though, that something was missing for me. Unhelpfully I don't quite know what.

It's one of those books where there was nothing to stop me finishing it and when I came to the end I could say, 'yes, I enjoyed that' but did I love it? Not really. Perhaps if there had been a bit of a longer build up and less long on the Tom Haley thread? But then if that had happened, would that have prevented me from caring about what happened to Serena?

What I did really enjoy about this book was the intellectual side. McEwan's characters are very intelligent and so the conversations they share reflect that. If I were honest with myself, I'd probably struggle to keep up with them in some cases and I'm 99% sure I wouldn't be a good recruit for the secret services but I did like taking a back seat and watching Serena climb the academic ladder, learn all she could from Tony and I took a little pleasure in seeing her confound Tom Haley with intricate mathematical problems. And even though I'm sure McEwan took similar pleasure when it came to constructing his ending, I have to allow him that - I didn't quite see it coming (and that's not something I ever like to admit... hence the addition of the word 'quite' in that sentence...).

I couldn't help but compare this novel to Restless by William Boyd - a very different war but nevertheless an exploration of the British secret service against a fascinating backdrop of international secrets with a ballsy woman at the helm and both, of course, written by some of the country's most talented and successful writers. The other similarity, though, was the disappointment factor although, if I had to pick, I would say Sweet Tooth pipped Restless to the post as, to me, Serena appealed that little bit more than Ruth.

This book gets a 7/10 from me.

Super Thursday 2013

One of my big secrets in life is that I'm a celebrity nut. Ok, so that sounds like a giant cashew or something but hopefully you get my meaning. I love all the Hollywood gossip even though I know the Metro's Guilty Pleasures section, ONTD and Perez Hilton are all gradually destroying each of my braincells one by one. When it comes to celebrity autobiographies like Jennifer Saunders' yesterday, though, sometimes I wonder if there are just too many.

Today is what publishing folk like to call Super Thursday. It's the day (usually a Thursday funnily enough) when all the big books of the autumn are released. The ones that will be sat under the tree in, publishers hope, millions of houses on Christmas Day and all ultimately dreaming that they will be the ones to beat Jamie fricking Oliver to the number 1 spot.

Just some of the books hitting the shelves today include autos by Jennifer Saunders, Sharon Osbourne, David Jason, John Bishop, Mo Farah, Rachel Khoo and Harry Redknap. Leading the fiction is, of course, Helen Fielding's Bridget Jones sequel, Mad About the Boy.

Back to the biographies, though, I have to say I feel relieved that this year shows people who have actually lived more than 18 years. That aside, though, I wonder whether these people have anything interesting to say. Admittedly I'm only in my twenties but the thought of putting together a book about my life bores me, let alone the poor idiots who read it. For instance, Sharon Osbourne - this is her third auto. I'm sure her life is far more interesting than mine but is it really three times more interesting?

Anyway, it seems celebrity autobiographies and cookbooks will continue to be published in their masses - we'll just have to see which ones actually fly.

Bonkers: Jennifer Saunders at the Royal Festival Hall

Jennifer Saunders can now add 'wrote a probably bestselling autobiography', 'interviewed by Clare Balding' and 'filled out the Royal Festival Hall' to her disgustingly long list of achievements. Doesn't she think someone else might like a chance?

Jennifer Saunders is the latest of a series of comedians to turn their mind to writing a book. Not fiction like friend and co-writer, Dawn French, but a long-awaited autobiography. Bonkers: My Life in Laughs will be released tomorrow on Super Thursday but last night Saunders gave the Royal Festival Hall a taster. The book will give us an insight into everything from writing her award-winning comedy series to battling breast cancer.

Jennifer Saunders recounted a series of anecdotes that had the whole hall shaking with laughter and Clare Balding charmingly kept everything moving along brilliantly, batting away a few awkward moments with ease.

I wasn't 100% sure of the best way to blog about this event - I obviously don't want to give you a blow by blow account of every story Saunders told... largely because I can't even begin to tell them as well as her... but I have to say, that really was the structure of the evening. I wouldn't say Saunders was a natural conversationalist but you're nothing but a cold, dull fish if you didn't enjoy the evening. I have concluded that the best way to sum up the evening was to tell you what I took away from it and that way you may also get an idea of the book...

1. Jennifer Saunders is a massive country music fan, loves Dolly Parton and has actually met her. Not sure if I've been more jealous.

2. All showbiz success stories start with living room performances to a reluctant audience. I just knew I should have kept up those impromptu Abba concerts I gave...

3. Everyone has a terrifying teacher at school but Saunders' headmistress (who was actually taken to court by parents for excessive caning of their mischievous teen) might help us heal at least a little of our own emotional bruising from simply terrifying teachers.

I guess my final point has to be whether I will buy the book. My answer is - not in hardback (only JK can make me do that) but the paperback must be worth buying just for Saunders' generous supply of hilarious photos, including some fantastic early French and Saunders shots...

A Doll's House

A Doll's House is a three-act play by Norwegian playwright Henrik Ibsen and looks into the life of a seemingly typical housewife who becomes disillusioned and dissatisfied with her marriage. The play in its current incarnation has received extraordinary reviews from the British press with Hatty Morahan's turn as Ibsen's protagonist, Nora Helmer, has been hailed as a 'once-in-a-lifetime performance'.

I've seen Morahan on stage and television a number of times and she is a fantastic serious actress but for me she often brings a comedic element to each production, and I can never tell if it's intentional... there's just something about her that makes people smile. In this case, and perhaps it was a conscious decision of the director, the subtle comedy worked perfectly. I don't know about anyone else but after years of studying Arthur Miller, Euguene O'Neil and Tennessee Williams, I've got used to a whole lot of bleak and very little laughter when it comes to drama, which is a shame because comedy, when used well, works brilliantly to both provide relief and/or heighten tension.

Although I've read and seen Ibsen before, I've never known much about A Doll's House and I have to say I loved it. Brilliantly performed, yes, but politically fascinating. I don't want to give away what happens even a little bit but, as everyone has been saying, it's amazing that this play, given its feminist sensibilities, was written in 1879. Simply having a female protagonist must have been controversial and A Doll's House isn't the last time Ibsen does this. Unsurprisingly the play's controversial subject and ending attracted a lot of criticism and outrage with Ibsen being forced to première the play in Germany with an alternative ending due to pressure from his agent and leading actress.

Interestingly, though, Ibsen was adamant that this was not a consciously feminist play, saying in his speech at the Festival of the Norwegian Women's Rights League in 1898 that he"must disclaim the honour of having consciously worked for the women's rights movement," as he wrote the play as "the description of humanity [...] without any conscious thought of making propaganda."

On to more important matters, the award for Best Overlooked Performance goes to... the baby. Perfected the cute podgy look, didn't look at all perturbed or utter so much as a whimper - triumph.

Tigers in Red Weather by Liza Klaussmann

Liza Klaussmann's Tigers in Red Weather tells the story of Nick and her cousin Helena who have grown up together, sharing long hot summers at Tiger House. With husbands and children of their own, they keep returning. But against a background of parties, cocktails, moonlight and jazz, how long can perfection last? There is always the summer that changes everything.

Tigers in Red Weather is a delicious novel, a book that simmers with tension, threat and an intoxicating cocktail of money, sex, heat, boredom and beauty. Gracefully drawn and utterly intriguing, it's the perfect summer blockbuster.

This was the book I was most excited to get reading this summer. It's a good example of some fantastic marketing - fantastic cover, title, a blurb that makes you feel the heat of summer... even when it's snowing in April... and all those wonderfully addictive cliches dropped in - jazz, cocktail parties, materialism, 'the summer that changed everything' etc - that I fall for every time.

Unfortunately, I found the whole book a bit disappointing. I'm not going to say it was bad because it really wasn't. Ostensibly it has some great themes - coming-of-age, crime, forbidden love (and lust) and a little voyeurism thrown in for good measure - but the execution, for me at least, lacked sophistication.

On the character side of things, I found the problem was that I couldn't find anyone to side with. Everyone was flawed, which is fine as otherwise it'd be unrealistic, but none of them were 'nice' people (the 'nice' police will have to excuse that one) and I too often found myself irritated by them.

One thing that Liza Klaussmann did succeed with, though, and the area where I felt the book was faithful to the blurb, was that I really did feel hot reading it. Not in a Fifty Shades kind of way, more that Klaussmann really got across that intense summer heat and the atmosphere that creates. In that way, the world very much came alive for me; I could imagine the huge house, the scorching tennis courts, the sweat dripping, the never-cold water.

Overall, though, it was a disappointing read for me. Probably not fair to have read it straight after Alone in Berlin though... not sure much could compete with that.

It gets a 5/10 from me, I'm afraid.

Carey Mulligan and Matthias Schoenaerts to star in Hardy film

It's no secret now that my knowledge of the really classic classics, as opposed to, well, The Great Gatsby... I suppose by that I mean classics that are super old and, often, super long and dense... is pretty poor. That said, it won't come as a surprise that I have never read a Thomas Hardy novel. Some of his poems, sure, and I'm always partial to a BBC drama here and there, but I've never completed one of his novels. I think perhaps I was scarred by everyone who studied him at GCSE: "Just sheep. Sheep and more sheep," was pretty much the gist.

That said, I was pretty excited to see that Thomas Vinterberg is doing a new adaptation of Far From the Madding Crowd with Carey Mulligan and Matthias Schoenaerts (if you haven't seen Rust and Bone, just do it. He is beautiful. Marion Cotillard is beautiful. The film is just, well, beautiful). The film will also star Michael Sheen, because it seems most films do and he is pretty good..., and Tom Sturridge, who I have to say I was pretty impressed by in On the Road last year. David Nicholls is on board to write the script, who as it happens also adapted the BBC's 2008 adaptation of Hardy's Tess of the D'Urbevilles with Gemma Arterton, and 2012's Great Expectations.

Far From the Madding Crowd, for anyone who doesn't know, follows Bathsheba Everdean who arrives in the village of Weatherbury and manages to capture the heart of three men. There is love but, as with any Hardy novel, there are also consequences.

Apparently this will be the fourth adaptation of the classic for the screen, the most famous starring Julie Christie in 1967, and more recently the novel inspired the comic-strip (and subsequent film), Tamara Drewe.

Right, guess I probably should read it now. We'll see...

Olafur Eliasson, Books and Madrid's Contemporary Arts Festival

Warning: potentially arty farty blog post...

Olafur Eliasson is a Danish-Icelandic contemporary artist and is best known for his large-scale installation art that has appeared in cities across the world. His three most famous pieces were his rainbow panorama at Denmark's ARoS Aarhus Kunstmuseum in Aarhus, four man-made waterfalls in New York Harbor, which ranged from 90 to 120 feet high, and his weather project which saw a gigantic sun light up the Turbine Hall at London's Tate Modern.

All three, as well as loads of his other projects, have carried distinct messages - culture, politics, and the guy just loves talking about climate change. Each piece also requires people to contribute to the art in some way, put something in so that it works (be it walking, lying down, listening...), so that change can happen and so that they can experience the art's full potential.

At Madrid's contemporary arts festival this month, Olafur Eliasson's latest project, 'A View Becomes the Window', uses these same ideas to look at the world of books to celebrate them at a time when they are under threat from digital. 

"I love books," he says, "but I'm not afraid of that. In my experience, the printed book has been taking on its own pride. The kind of paper used matters, typography matters, books are books again."

So, what's the piece. Eliasson has made 9 pretty spectacular looking books from hand-blown glass, each page nearly a metre high. Each page is a different colour and each has a hole cut into the centre. These holes, Eliasson insists, are not 'voids' but instead allow you to see the colour of both the page before and the page to come, with the idea being that we must always in the present remember what has happened but also what is to come. So, the colour of each page is determined by the colour of the pages either side but they also reflect whatever is around them - time of day, the room etc - arguably as a book's 'meaning' or message is always, to an extent, a reflection of who the reader is and their subjective response.

Importantly, the 'reader' must turn the pages - they themselves must 'do' something or else nothing changes, nothing happens, the art remains incomplete. Eliasson's overarching message is that books, like anything else, are our 'shared responsiblity'. I couldn't agree more, although that's not to say that we have to completely reject any kind of change...

He's not the only artist to have had their say on books. Perhaps take a look at Anish Kapoor's Wound Book or the aMAZEme installation at the Southbank Centre last year.