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Africa
*Overall Best Book Award Winner*
Best Book: Arimatta Forna (Sierra Leone)
The Memory Of Love
 Freetown,
Sierra Leone: a devastating civil war has left an
entire populace with terrible secrets to keep. In the
capital’s hospital Kai, a gifted young surgeon is
plagued by demons that are beginning to threaten his
livelihood. Elsewhere in the hospital lies Elias Cole,
a university professor who recalls the love that
obsessed him and drove him to acts that are far from
heroic.
As past and present intersect, Kai and Elias are drawn
unwittingly closer by Adrian, a British psychiatrist
with good intentions, and into the path of one woman
at the centre of their stories. The Memory of Love
is a heartbreaking story of ordinary people in
extraordinary circumstances.
Best First Book: Cynthia Jele (South Africa)
Happiness Is A Four-Letter Word
 Nandi, Zaza,
Tumi and Princess are four ordinary friends living
life in the fast and fabulous lanes of Joburg.
Suddenly, no amount of cocktails can cure the stress
that simultaneously unsettles their lives. Nandi’s
final wedding arrangements are nearly in place so why
is she feeling on edge?
Zaza, the “trophy wife”, waits for the day her affair
comes to light and her husband gives her a one-way
ticket back to the township; Tumi has only one wish to
complete her perfect life – a child. But when her wish
is granted, it’s not exactly how she pictured it. And
Princess? For the first time ever, she has fallen in
love – with Leo, a painter who seems to press all the
right buttons. But soon she discovers – like her
friends already have – that life is not a bed of
roses, and happiness never comes with a manual...
South East Asia
& South Pacific
Best Book: Kim Scott (Australia)
That Deadman Dance
 Big-hearted,
moving and richly rewarding, That Deadman Dance
is set in the first decades of the 19th century in
the area around what is now Albany, Western
Australia. In playful, musical prose, the book
explores the early contact between the Aboriginal
Noongar people and the first European settlers.
The novel's hero is a young Noongar man named Bobby
Wabalanginy. Clever, resourceful and eager to
please, Bobby befriends the new arrivals, joining
them hunting whales, tilling the land, exploring the
hinterland and establishing the fledgling colony. He
is even welcomed into a prosperous local white
family where he falls for the daughter, Christine, a
beautiful young woman who sees no harm in a liaison
with a native.
But slowly – by design and by accident – things
begin to change. Not everyone is happy with how the
colony is developing. Stock mysteriously start to
disappear; crops are destroyed; there are
"accidents" and injuries on both sides. As the
Europeans impose ever stricter rules and regulations
in order to keep the peace, Bobby's Elders decide
they must respond in kind. A friend to everyone,
Bobby is forced to take sides: he must choose
between the old world and the new, his ancestors and
his new friends. Inexorably, he is drawn into a
series of events that will forever change not just
the colony but the future of Australia...
*Overall Best First Book Award Winner*
Best First Book: Craig Cliff (New Zealand)
A Man Melting
 A son
worries he is becoming too perfect a copy of his
father. The co-owner of a weight-loss camp for teens
finds himself running the black market in chocolate
bars. A man starts melting and nothing can stop it,
not even poetry.
This terrific collection of stories by an exciting
new talent moves from the serious and realistic to
the humorous and outlandish, each story copying an
element from the previous piece in a kind of
evolutionary chain. Amid pigeons with a taste for
cigarette ash, a rash of moa sightings, and the
identity crisis of an imaginary friend, the
characters in these eighteen entertaining stories
look for ways to reconnect with people and the world
around them, even if that means befriending a robber
wielding an iguana.
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Europe & South
Asia
Best Book: David Mitchell (UK)
The Thousand Autumns Of Jacob De Zoet
 Be
transported to a place like no other: a tiny, man-made
island in the bay of Nagasaki, for two hundred years
the sole gateway between Japan and the West. Here, in
the dying days of the 18th-century, a young Dutch
clerk arrives to make his fortune. Instead he loses
his heart.
Step onto the streets of Dejima and mingle with
scheming traders, spies, interpreters, servants and
concubines as two cultures converge. In a tale of
integrity and corruption, passion and power, the key
is control - of riches and minds, and over death
itself.
Best First Book: Mischa Hiller (UK)
Sabra Zoo
 It is the
summer of 1982 and Beirut is under siege. It is the
summer of 1982 and Beirut is under siege.
Eighteen-year-old Ivan's parents have just been
evacuated from the city with other members of the
Palestine Liberation Organisation.
Ivan stays on, interpreting for international medical
volunteers in Sabra refugee camp by day, getting
stoned with them at night, and working undercover for
the PLO. Hoping to get closer to Eli, a Norwegian
physiotherapist, he helps her treat Youssef, a camp
orphan disabled by a cluster bomb. An unexpected
friendship develops between the three and things begin
to look up …
But events take a nasty turn when the president-elect
is assassinated. The Israeli army enters Beirut and
surrounds the camp, with Eli and Youssef trapped
inside. Are rumours of a massacre in the camp true?
Will Ivan be able to salvage anything from the chaos?
Canada and Caribbean
Best Book: Emma Donoghue (Canada)
Room
 The
story of a mother, her son, a locked room and the
outside world
It’s Jack’s birthday, and he’s excited about turning
five.
Jack lives with his Ma in Room, which has a locked
door and a skylight, and measures 11 feet by 11
feet. He loves watching TV, and the cartoon
characters he calls friends, but he knows that
nothing he sees on screen is truly real – only him,
Ma and the things in Room. Until the day Ma admits
that there's a world outside . . .
Told in Jack's voice, Room is the story of a
mother and son whose love lets them survive the
impossible. Unsentimental and sometimes funny,
devastating yet uplifting, Room is a novel
like no other.
Best First Book: Katrina Best (Canada)
Bird Eat Bird
Bird
Eat Bird, Katrina Best's first book of short
stories, is a funny, smart, offbeat and insightful
collection that explores themes that are equally
poignant and hilarious.
A thirty-year-old woman who still lives at home
anticipates the experience of a third date; a
teenaged vegetarian supermarket cashier struggles to
scan a package of offal; an inscrutable pelican in a
crowded London park decides to try something
different for dinner. These artful stories are
tinged with social commentary and reflect their
author in that they feature characters and
sensibilities from both Britain and Canada.
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