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The
Irish
Book Awards 2011:
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The British Book Awards 2011:Outstanding Achievement Jackie CollinsPopular Fiction Book of the Year Daughters-in-law by Joanna Trollope Gillespie & I by Jane Harris My Last Duchess by Daisy Goodwin Snuff by Terry Pratchett The Radleys by Matt Haig  *Winner*A Tiny Bit Marvellous, Dawn French Mo is about to hit the big 50, and some uncomfortable truths are becoming quite apparent: She doesn't understand either of her teenage kids, which as a child psychologist, is fairly embarrassing. She has become entirely grey. Inside, and out. Her face has surrendered and is frightening children. Dora is about to hit the big 18 . . . and about to hit anyone who annoys her, especially her precocious younger brother Peter who has a chronic Oscar Wilde fixation. Then there's Dad . . . who's just, well, dad. A Tiny Bit Marvellous is the story of a modern family all living in their own separate bubbles lurching towards meltdown. It is for anyone who has ever shared a home with that weird group of strangers we call relations. Oh and there's a dog. Called Poo. Popular Non-fiction Book of the Year A History Of The World In 100 Objects by Neil MacGregorMadeleine by Kate McCann Map Of A Nation by Rachel Hewitt The Good, The Bad & The Multiplex by Mark Kermode Wonders Of The Universe by Brian Cox  *Winner*How To Be A Woman, Caitlin Moran There's never been a better time to be a woman: we have the vote and the Pill, and we haven't been burnt as witches since 1727. However, a few nagging questions do remain... Why are we supposed to get Brazilians? Should you get Botox? Do men secretly hate us? What should you call your vagina? Why does your bra hurt? And why does everyone ask you when you're going to have a baby? Part memoir, part rant, Caitlin Moran answers these questions and more in How To Be A Woman - following her from her terrible 13th birthday ('I am 13 stone, have no friends, and boys throw gravel at me when they see me') through adolescence, the workplace, strip-clubs, love, fat, abortion, TopShop, motherhood and beyond. Biography of the Year The Genius In My Basement by Alexander MastersHitch 22 by Christopher Hitchens Life by Keith Richards Mud, Sweat & Tears by Bear Grylls Red Dust Road by Jackie Kay  *Winner*Charles Dickens, Claire Tomalin Charles Dickens was a phenomenon: a demonically hardworking journalist, the father of ten children, a tireless walker and traveller, a supporter of liberal social causes, but most of all a great novelist - the creator of characters who live immortally in the English imagination: the Artful Dodger, Mr Pickwick, Pip, David Copperfield, Little Nell, Lady Dedlock, and many more. At the age of twelve he was sent to work in a blacking factory by his affectionate but feckless parents. From these unpromising beginnings, he rose to scale all the social and literary heights, entirely through his own efforts. When he died, the world mourned, and he was buried - against his wishes - in Westminster Abbey. Yet the brilliance concealed a divided character: a republican, he disliked America; sentimental about the family in his writings, he took up passionately with a young actress; usually generous, he cut off his impecunious children. Claire Tomalin paints an unforgettable portrait of Dickens, capturing brilliantly the complex character of this great genius. Charles Dickens: A Life is the examination of Dickens we deserve. Food & Drink Book of the Year Home Cooking Made Easy by Lorraine PascaleJamie's Great Britain by Jamie Oliver Made In Sicily by Giorgio Locatelli Rick Stein's Spain by Rick Stein The Vintage Tea Party by Angel Adoree  *Winner*The Good Cook, Simon Hopkinson Simon Hopkinson loves food and he knows how to cook it. The Good Cook is the result of over 40 years' experience and is based on Simon's belief that a good cook loves eating as much as cooking. How the ingredients you choose and the way you cook them will turn a good recipe into a great dish. That a cheap cut of meat cooked with care can taste as nice as a choice cut prepared by indifferent hands. Structured around Simon's passion for good ingredients (Anchovy and Aubergine, Cheese and Wine, Smoked and Salted Fish, Ham, Bacon and A Little Pig) and written with Simon's trademark perfectionism and precision, this is a book that you will cherish for life. Children's Book of the Year Dead Man's Cove by Lauren St John My Sister Lives On The Mantelpiece by Annabel Pitcher One Dog & His Boy by Eva Ibbotson Stuck by Oliver Jeffers The Highway Rat by Julia Donaldson & Axel Scheffler A Monster Calls, Patrick Ness The monster showed up just after midnight. As they do. But it isn’t the monster Conor's been expecting. He's been expecting the one from his nightmare, the one he's had nearly every night since his mother started her treatments, the one with the darkness and the wind and the screaming... The monster in his back garden, though, this monster is something different. Something ancient, something wild. And it wants the most dangerous thing of all from Conor. It wants the truth. Costa Award winner Patrick Ness spins a tale from the final idea of much-loved Carnegie Medal winner Siobhan Dowd, whose premature death from cancer prevented her from writing it herself. Darkly mischievous and painfully funny, A Monster Calls is an extraordinarily moving novel of coming to terms with loss from two of our finest writers for young adults. New Writer of the Year Before I Go To Sleep by S.J. WatsonGrace Williams Says It Loud by Emma Henderson Pigeon English by Stephen Kelman Rivers Of London by Ben Aaronovitch Snowdrops by A.D. Miller  *Winner*When God Was A Rabbit, Sarah Winman Spanning four decades, from 1968 onwards, this is the story of a fabulous but flawed family and the slew of ordinary and extraordinary incidents that shape their everyday lives. It is a story about childhood and growing up, loss of innocence, eccentricity, familial ties and friendships, love and life. Stripped down to its bare bones, it's about the unbreakable bond between a brother and sister. International Author of the Year Haruki Murakami for 1Q84Erin Mogenstern for The Night Circus Sebastian Barry for On Canaan's Side Jo Nesbo for The Leopard Téa Obreht for The Tiger's Wife  *Winner*A Visit From The Goon Squad, Jennifer Egan Jennifer Egan’s spellbinding novel circles the lives of Bennie Salazar, an aging former punk rocker and record executive, and Sasha, the passionate, troubled young woman he employs. Although Bennie and Sasha never discover each other’s pasts, the reader does, in intimate detail, along with the secret lives of a host of other characters whose paths intersect with theirs, over many years, in locales as varied as New York, San Francisco, Naples, and Africa. We first meet Sasha in her mid-thirties, on her therapist’s couch in New York City, confronting her longstanding compulsion to steal. Later, we learn the genesis of her turmoil when we see her as the child of a violent marriage, then a runaway living in Naples, then as a college student trying to avert the suicidal impulses of her best friend. We meet Bennie Salazar at the melancholy nadir of his adult life—divorced, struggling to connect with his nine-year-old son, listening to a washed up band in the basement of a suburban house—and then revisit him in 1979, at the height of his youth, shy and tender, reveling in San Francisco’s punk scene as he discovers his ardor for rock and roll and his gift for spotting talent. We learn what became of his high school gang—who thrived and who faltered—and we encounter Lou Kline, Bennie’s catastrophically careless mentor, along with the lovers and children left behind in the wake of Lou’s far flung sexual conquests and meteoric rise and fall. A Visit from the Goon Squad is a book about the interplay of time and music, about survival, about the stirrings and transformations set inexorably in motion by even the most passing conjunction of our fates. In a breathtaking array of styles and tones ranging from tragedy to satire to Powerpoint, Egan captures the undertow of self-destruction that we all must either master or succumb to; the basic human hunger for redemption; and the universal tendency to reach for both—and escape the merciless progress of time—in the transporting realms of art and music. Sly, startling, exhilarating work from one of our boldest writers. UK Author of the Year Julian Barnes for The Sense Of An EndingCarol Birch for Jamrach's Menagerie Carol Ann Duffy for The Bees Anthony Horowitz for The House Of Silk Andrea Levy for The Long Song 
*Winner*The Stranger's Child, Alan Hollinghurst In the late summer of 1913 the aristocratic young poet Cecil Valance comes to stay at ‘Two Acres’, the home of his close Cambridge friend George Sawle. The weekend will be one of excitements and confusions for all the Sawles, but it is on George’s sixteen-year-old sister Daphne that it will have the most lasting impact, when Cecil writes her a poem which will become a touchstone for a generation, an evocation of an England about to change for ever. Linking the Sawle and Valance families irrevocably, the shared intimacies of this weekend become legendary events in a larger story, told and interpreted in different ways over the coming century, and subjected to the scrutiny of critics and biographers with their own agendas and anxieties. In a sequence of widely separated episodes we follow the two families through startling changes in fortune and circumstance. At the centre of this often richly comic history of sexual mores and literary reputation runs the story of Daphne, from innocent girlhood to wary old age. Around her Hollinghurst draws an absorbing picture of an England constantly in flux. As in The Line of Beauty, his impeccably nuanced exploration of changing taste, class and social etiquette is conveyed in deliciously witty and observant prose. Exposing our secret longings to the shocks and surprises of time, The Stranger’s Child is an enthralling novel from one of the finest writers in the English language. is an enthralling novel from one of the finest writers in the English language. Thriller & Crime Novel of the Year The Fear Index by Robert Harris Heartstone by C J Sansom The Family by Martina Cole The Impossible Dead by Ian Rankin Trick Of The Dark by Val McDermid  *Winner*Before I Go To Sleep, S.J. Watson Memories define us. So what if you lost yours every time you went to sleep? Your name, your identity, your past, even the people you love - all forgotten overnight. And the one person you trust may only be telling you half the story. Welcome to Christine's life. Paperback of the Year The Brightest Star In The Sky by Marian Keyes The Postmistress by Sarah Blake The Red Queen by Philippa Gregory When God Was A Rabbit by Sarah Winman You're Next by Gregg Hurwitz  *Winner*Room, Emma Donoghue 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. Audiobook of the Year Any Human Heart by William Boyd, read by Mike GradyBefore I Go To Sleep by S J Watson, read by Susannah Harker My Sister Lives On The Mantlepiece by Annabel Pitcher, read by David Tennant Snowdrops by A.D. Miller, read by Kevin Howarth The Player Of Games by Iain M. Banks, read by Peter Kenny  *Winner*My Dear I Wanted To Tell You, Set on the Western Front, in London and in Paris, My Dear I Wanted To Tell You is a moving and brilliant novel of love, class and sex in wartime, and how war affects those left behind as well as those who fight. While Riley Purefoy and Peter Locke fight for their country, their survival and their sanity in the trenches of Flanders, Nadine Waveney, Julia Locke and Rose Locke do what they can at home. Beautiful, obsessive Julia and gentle, eccentric Peter are married: each day Julia goes through rituals to prepare for her beloved husband’s return. Nadine and Riley, only eighteen when the war starts, and with problems of their own already, want above all to make promises - but how can they when the future is not in their hands? And Rose? Well, what did happen to the traditionally brought-up women who lost all hope of marriage, because all the young men were dead? |
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