Costa/Whitbread Novel Award Winners

Top 10 Costa/Whitbread Novel Award Winners : Behind the Scenes at the Museum, Restless, The Satanic Verses, Small Island, Spies, The Accidental, Brooklyn, Every Man for Himself, The Sacred and Profane Love Machine, Music & Silence

Behind the Scenes at the Museum
AuthorKate Atkinson
ISBN0312150601
"As a family, we are genetically disposed towards having accidents."

First and foremost, this is a challenging ambitious book, more so than Life after Life. The narrative is a labyrinth of twists and turns, false trails, loops and double helixes. There’s also an awful lot to remember because...
Restless
AuthorWilliam Boyd
ISBN0747589372
“I am Eva Delectorskaya,” Sally Gilmartin announces, and so on a warm summer afternoon in 1976 her daughter, Ruth, learns that everything she ever knew about her mother was a carefully constructed lie. Sally Gilmartin is a respectable English widow living in picturesque Cotswold village; Eva...
The Satanic Verses
AuthorSalman Rushdie
ISBN0312270828
Just before dawn one winter's morning, a hijacked jetliner explodes above the English Channel. Through the falling debris, two figures, Gibreel Farishta, the biggest star in India, and Saladin Chamcha, an expatriate returning from his first visit to Bombay in fifteen years, plummet from the sky,...
Small Island
AuthorAndrea Levy
ISBN0312424671
Hortense Joseph arrives in London from Jamaica in 1948 with her life in her suitcase, her heart broken, her resolve intact. Her husband, Gilbert Joseph, returns from the war expecting to be received as a hero, but finds his status as a black man in Britain to be second class. His white landlady, Queenie,...
Spies
AuthorMichael Frayn
ISBN0571212964
Another from the 2002 Booker longlist, this one is a quiet revelation and a masterly piece of storytelling.

The action is narrated by an old man revisiting the scene and remembering his childhood adventures in suburban England during the Second World War. The story is narrated from the childhood...
The Accidental
AuthorAli Smith
ISBN1400032180
Winner of the Whitbread Award for best novel and a finalist for the Man Booker Prize, The Accidental is the virtuoso new novel by the singularly gifted Ali Smith. Jonathan Safran Foer has called her writing “thrilling.” Jeanette Winterson has praised her for her “style, ideas, and punch.”...
Brooklyn
AuthorColm Tóibín
ISBN1439138311
Hauntingly beautiful and heartbreaking, Colm Tóibín's sixth novel, Brooklyn, is set in Brooklyn and Ireland in the early 1950s, when one young woman crosses the ocean to make a new life for herself.

Eilis Lacey has come of age in small-town Ireland in the years following World War Two. Though...
AuthorBeryl Bainbridge
ISBN0786704675
The story of the maiden voyage of the Titanic is a familiar one, but Bainbridge still managed an impressively fresh reimagination of the personal experiences of a rich young Anglo-American who has been adopted by the family of J.P. Morgan. His journey is somewhat picaresque - he spends most of the voyage...
AuthorIris Murdoch
ISBN0140041117
Swinging between his wife and his mistress in the sacred and profane love machine and between the charms of morality and the excitements of sin, the psychotherapist, Blaise Gavender, sometimes wishes he could divide himself in two. Instead, he lets loose misery and confusion and—for the spectators...
AuthorRose Tremain
ISBN0743418263
Set in seventeenth-century Denmark, Rose Tremain's dazzling, prize-winning tale is a pungently atmospheric, richly provocative, and masterfully orchestrated romance of point and counterpoint: loyalty and deception...tenderness and violence...community and alienation...peace and conflict..."Music...
AuthorJane Gardam
ISBN0349102260
What is truly amazing about this book is how all the different pieces hold together! I would say that this is what characterizes Gardam’s books.

We are given a complicated puzzle that is begging to be solved. For people who love solving puzzles or mysteries, it is a must read.

When...
AuthorA.L. Kennedy
ISBN0224077864
Ms Kennedy should have a category of her own with different coloured stars, or the option to have the stars squared, 3D at the very least. She's a writer who expects a lot of her reader, and I like that. The opening chapter of this novel is a struggle, even the second time round it's not a smooth ride, no familiar...
AuthorDavid Lodge
ISBN0140057463
This 1980 novel by Lodge (whom you may have noticed I've been reading a lot of and enjoying this year) follows a group of young English Catholics over a period of about 20 years, enabling us to see the ways their religion affects their lives (and their lives affect their religion), particularly in the shadow...
AuthorJoan Brady
"[A] vivid historical novel--part poignant biographical fiction, part raw frontier epic."
TIME
Taking flight from an extraordinary real-life family history, here is a riveting novel of how the past lives on, generation after generation. THEORY OF WAR is the richly imagined story of one...
AuthorAlasdair Gray
ISBN0747562288
One of Alasdair Gray's most brilliant creations, Poor Things is a postmodern revision of Frankenstein that replaces the traditional monster with Bella Baxter - a beautiful young erotomaniac brought back to life with the brain of an infant. Godwin Baxter's scientific ambition to create the perfect...
A God in Ruins
AuthorKate Atkinson
ISBN0316176532
In Life After Life Ursula Todd lived through the turbulent events of the last century again and again. In A God in Ruins, Atkinson turns her focus on Ursula’s beloved younger brother Teddy – would-be poet, RAF bomber pilot, husband and father – as he navigates the perils and progress of the 20th...
How to Be Both
AuthorAli Smith
Passionate, compassionate, vitally inventive and scrupulously playful, Ali Smith’s novels are like nothing else. A true original, she is a one-of-a-kind literary sensation. Her novels consistently attract serious acclaim and discussion—and have won her a dedicated readership who are drawn...
AuthorNicholas Mosley
ISBN1564782425
-- A sweeping, comprehensive epic, Hopeful Monsters tells the story of the love affair between Max, an English student of physics and biology, and Eleanor, a German Jewess and political radical. Together and apart, Max and Eleanor participate in the great political and intellectual movements which...
AuthorWilliam Trevor
ISBN0140253602
Felicia is unmarried, pregnant, and penniless. She steals away from a small Irish town and drifts through the industrial English Midlands, searching for the boyfriend who left her. Instead she meets up with the fat, fiftyish, unfailingly reasonable Mr. Hilditch, who is looking for a new friend to...
AuthorPatrick Neate
ISBN0802140564
This rich and epic novel is written with each chapter a phrase of a twelve bar blues structure, each of the different pieces of the harmonic progression coordinating with a different storyline.

The book begins with a Prologue set in the mythical Afican kingdom of Zimindo in 1790, where two young...
Bring Up the Bodies
AuthorHilary Mantel
Alternate Cover Edition ISBN 0805090037 (ISBN13: 9780805090031)

The sequel to Hilary Mantel's international bestseller and Man Booker Prize winner Wolf Hall explores one of the most mystifying and frightening episodes in English history: the downfall of Anne Boleyn.
...
Though...
AuthorLindsay Clarke
ISBN0449001180
I read this last December and enjoyed it immensely. It had been recommended to me twenty years ago, and finally I have been able to get to it. I could easily give it five stars, but then I would be only thinking of myself. Truth is, Clarke is a bit verbose for some tastes. And though I prefer more minimalist,...
AuthorJennifer Johnston
ISBN0140106987
4★
This begins as a light-hearted, affectionate look at a young girl growing up in Ireland in 1920, after the end of WW1, but her childish, secret adventure turns serious and shows the dark divisions in Ireland.

Nancy was orphaned very young and has been raised in a friendly, loving household...
AuthorPaul Theroux
ISBN0140050728
World-famous photographer Maude Coffin Pratt has pointed her lens at the beautiful, obscure, and obscene, and at the private places and public parts of the famous, from Gertrude Stein to Graham Greene. When the seventy-year-old Maude rummages through her archives in preparation for a triumphant...
AuthorBeryl Bainbridge
ISBN0349116113
"He almost took the wrong turning at the next roundabout. Muriel remained silent but pointed a contemptuous finger, at the last moment, in the correct direction"

Its that little clause at the last moment that captures the delight of this odd awkward story. The awkwardness is not of the writing,...
AuthorWilliam Trevor
ISBN0140047182
CONTAINS SPOILERS

The main character comes across at first as a special ed kid, but as the story evolves we see that he is truly mentally disturbed. He’s an older teenager who is cast aside by his family. He has no father and his mother and older sister are good buddies, laughing, smoking, eating...
AuthorWilliam McIlvanney
ISBN0340407573
His face made a fist at the world. The twined remnant of umbilicus projected vulnerably. Hands, feet and prick. He had come equipped for the job.

Newborn Conn Docherty, raw as a fresh wound, lies between his parents in their tenement room, with no birthright but a life's labour in the pits of his...
AuthorSusan Hill
ISBN0140040722
Francis Croft, the greatest poet of his age, was mad. His world was a nightmare of internal furies and haunting poetic vision. Harvey Lawson watched and protected him until his final suicide. From his solitary old age Harvey writes this brief account of their twenty years together and then burns all...
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