Shortlist for the 2007 Costa Novel Award (150 entries)
Skin Lane by Neil Bartlett (Serpent's Tail)
At 47, Mr. F's working life on London's Skin Lane is one governed by calm, precision and routine. So when he starts to have frightening, recurring nightmares, he does his best to ignore them; after all, he's a perfectly ordinary middle-aged man. As London's crooked backstreets begin to swelter in the long, hot summer of 1967, Mr. F's nightmare becomes an obsession. A chance encounter adds a face to the body that nightly haunts him, and the torments of his sweat-drenched nights lead him deeper into a terrifying labyrinth of rage, desire and shame.
To read the Category Judges' review of this book click here.
Day by A.L. Kennedy (Jonathan Cape)
Alfred Day wanted his war. In its turmoil he found his proper purpose as the tail-gunner in a Lancaster bomber; he found the wild, dark fellowship of his crew, and he found Joyce, a woman to love. But that's all gone now - the war took it away. Now, in 1949, Alfred is winding back time to see where he lost himself. He has taken the role of an extra in a POW film. Shipped out to Germany and an ersatz camp, he picks his way through the cliches that will become all that's left of his war and begins to do what he's never dared - to remember. He is looking for some semblance of hope: trying to move forward by going back.
To read the Category Judges' review of this book click here.
Death of a Murderer by Rupert Thomson (Bloomsbury)
Towards the end of November 2002, Billy Tyler, a seasoned police constable in his mid-forties, is summoned to the mortuary of a hospital in Suffolk. For the next twelve hours, from seven in the evening till seven in the morning, he is responsible for guarding the body of the notorious child-killer, Myra Hindley. Billy's approach is utterly professional, but as the night wears on, in the eerie silence of the hospital, the dead woman's presence begins to assert itself, and Billy's own problems and anxieties gradually acquire a new and unexpected significance.
To read the Category Judges' review of this book click here.
The Road Home by Rose Tremain (Chatto & Windus)
Lev is on his way from Eastern Europe to Britain, seeking work. Lev begins with no job, little money and few words of English. He has only his memories, his hopes and a flair for preparing food. Behind him loom the figures of his dead wife, his beloved daughter and his outrageous friend Rudi. Now, in front of Lev, lies the deep strangeness of the British: their hostile streets, their clannish pubs, their obsession with celebrity, and their lonely flats. London holds out the alluring possibilities of friendship, sex, money and a new career; but, more than this, of human understanding and a sense of belonging.
To read the Category Judges' review of this book click here.
Shortlist for the 2007 Costa First Novel Award (80 entries)
A Golden Age by Tahmima Anam (John Murray)
As Rehana Haque awakes one March morning, she might be forgiven for feeling happy. Today she will throw a party for her son and daughter. In the garden of the house she has built, her roses are blooming; her children are almost grown-up; and beyond their doorstep, the city is buzzing with excitement after recent elections. Change is in the air. But none of the guests at Rehana's party can foresee what will happen in the days and months that follow. For this is East Pakistan in 1971, a country on the brink of war, and this family's life is about to change forever. As she struggles to keep her family safe, Rehana will find herself faced with a heartbreaking dilemma.
To read the Category Judges' review of this book click here.
What Was Lost by Catherine O'Flynn (Tindal Street Press)
A lost little girl with her notebook and toy monkey appears on the CCTV screens of the Green Oaks shopping centre, evoking memories of junior detective, Kate Meaney, missing for 20 years. Kurt, a security guard with a sleep disorder and Lisa, a disenchanted deputy manager at Your Music, follow her through the centre's endless corridors - welcome relief from customers, colleagues and the Green Oaks mystery shopper. But, as this after-hours friendship grows in intensity, it brings new loss and new longing to light.
To read the Category Judges' review of this book click here.
Gifted by Nikita Lalwani (Viking)
At fourteen, Rumi is firmly set on the path of a gifted child, speeding headlong towards Oxford University. As her father sees it, discipline is everything if the family has any hope of making its mark on its adoptive country. However, as Rumi gets older and the family's stark isolation intensifies, numbers start to lose their magic for the young teenager: she abandons the rigid timetable of her afternoons to seek out friendship and replaces equations with rampant spice abuse. As her longing for love and her parents' will to succeed deepen, so too does the rift between generations.
To read the Category Judges' review of this book click here.
Mosquito by Roma Tearne (Harper Press)
When Theo returns to his native Sri Lanka after his wife's death, he hopes to escape his loss amidst the lush landscape of his increasingly war-torn country. But as he gives himself up to life in his beautiful, tortured land, he finds himself slipping into friendship with an artistic young girl, Nulani - a friendship that blossoms into love. Under the threat of civil war, as the quiet coastal town fills with whispers and suspicions, their affair offers a glimmer of hope to a country on the brink of destruction. But all too soon, the violence which has cast an ominous shadow over their love explodes. No one, it seems, is safe and ultimately, each of them will be tested in the most terrible ways.
To read the Category Judges' review of this book click here.
Shortlist for the 2007 Costa Biography Award (113 entries)
Rudolf Nureyev by Julie Kavanagh (Fig Tree)
Ballet's first pop icon, Rudolf Nureyev, revolutionised an old artform, bringing a new young audience to opera houses and sparking Rudimania across the globe. From his birth on a train in Siberia at the height of Stalin's terrors, Nureyev's life was extraordinary. This definitive biography of one of the most iconic figures of the twentieth century, ten years in the making, draws on previously unseen letters, diaries and home-movie footage to give an intimate, revealing and dramatic picture of this dazzling and complex figure.
To read the Category Judges' review of this book click here.
Agent Zigzag by Ben Macintyre (Bloomsbury)
Agent Zigzag is the untold story of Britain's most extraordinary wartime double agent; Eddie Chapman. Chapman was a dashing, louche, courageous and unpredictable man whose talents led to a single end: breaking the rules. This was a man who courted contradictions as much as he courted adventure. Inside the traitor was a hero; inside the villain, a man of conscience; the problem for Chapman, his spymasters and his many lovers, was to know where one ended and the other began.
To read the Category Judges' review of this book click here.
Young Stalin by Simon Sebag Montefiore (Weidenfeld & Nicolson)
Stalin, like Hitler, remains the personification of evil but also one of the creators of today's world. Based on massive research and astonishing new evidence in archives from Moscow to Georgia, Young Stalin is a chronicle of the Revolution, a pre-history of the USSR and an intimate biography unveiling the shadowy, adventurous journey of the Georgian cobbler's son who was to become the Red Tsar.
To read the Category Judges' review of this book click here.
Fatty Batter by Michael Simkins (Ebury Press)
Fatty Batter is the story of one man's lifelong obsession with cricket. From his earliest awkward days as a fat schoolboy, to his years running a team of dysfunctional inadequates, cricket has offered Michael Simkins a shelter from life's irksome realities and a place in which to quietly dream. That place is a peculiarly English arcadia of occasional wondrous beauty, forests of comforting statistics and the endless life-affirming rituals of defeat, humiliation and disappointment - the perfect practice net for life.
To read the Category Judges' review of this book click here.
Shortlist for the 2007 Costa Poetry Award (72 entries)
The Speed of Dark by Ian Duhig (Picador)
The Speed of Dark is structured around Duhig's reworking of the text of Le Roman de Fauvel, a medieval satire that railed against the corruption of the twelfth-century French court and Church. In Duhig's version however, the tale of the power-mad horse-king Fauvel gains a terrifying and contemporary relevance, and is identified with more recent crusades, crazed ambitions and insatiable greeds.
To read the Category Judges' review of this book click here.
The Space of Joy by John Fuller (Chatto & Windus)
The Space of Joy is a sequence of poems that recounts the endless desire for love - and the failures and compromises which accompany that desire - in a number of writers and musicians who fatally prioritise their art. If there is any resolution in this sequence, it is the conviction that while 'poetry may be the only heaven we have', it is life itself that must create the 'space of joy' which art wishes to celebrate.
To read the Category Judges' review of this book click here.
Look We Have Coming to Dover! by Daljit Nagra (Faber and Faber)
Taking in its sights Matthew Arnold's 'land of dreams', Look We Have Coming to Dover! explores the idealism and reality of a multicultural Britain. Nagra, whose own parents came to England from the Punjab in the 1950s, conjures a jazzed hybrid language to tell stories of aspiration, assimilation, alienation and love, from a stowaway's first footprint on Dover Beach to the disenchantment of subsequent generations.
To read the Category Judges' review of this book click here.
Tilt by Jean Sprackland (Cape Poetry)
Jean Sprackland's third collection describes a world in freefall. Chaos and calamity are at our shoulder, in the shape of fire and flood, ice-storm and hurricane; trains stand still, zoos are abandoned, migrating birds lose their way - all surfaces are unreliable, all territories unmapped. These poems explore the ambivalence and dark unease of slippage and collapse, but also carry a powerful sense of the miraculous made manifest amongst the ordinary.
To read the Category Judges' review of this book click here.
Shortlist for the 2007 Costa Children's Book Award (138 entries)
The Bower Bird by Ann Kelley (Luath Press Limited)
Gussie lives in Cornwall and, like most twelve-year-olds, is quickly growing up. She is also awaiting news of a heart transplant operation. When Gussie moves from the coast to a new house in town, she rebels, discovers her ancestors and an interest in photography, falls in love and has parent troubles - all whilst experiencing general adolescent angst and trying not to wait for what might never happen.
To read the Category Judges' review of this book click here.
Crusade by Elizabeth Laird (Macmillan Children's Books)
When Adam's mother dies unconfessed, he pledges to save her soul with dust from the Holy Land. Employed as a dog-boy for the local knight, Adam grabs the chance to join the Crusade to reclaim Jerusalem. He burns with determination to strike down the infidel enemy...
Salim, a merchant's son, is leading an uneventful life in the port of Acre - until news arrives that a Crusader attack is imminent. To keep Salim safe, his father buys him an apprenticeship with an esteemed, travelling Jewish doctor. But Salim's employment leads him to the heart of Sultan Saladin's camp - and into battle against the barbaric and unholy invaders...
To read the Category Judges' review of this book click here.
What I Was by Meg Rosoff (Puffin Books)
"I'd been kicked out of two boarding schools and the last thing I wanted was to be here, on the East Anglian coast, in a third. But without St Oswald's, I would not have discovered the fisherman's hut with its roaring fire, its striped blankets and its sea monster stew. Without St Oswald's, I would not have met the boy with the beautiful eyes, the flickering half-smile and no past. Without St Oswald's, I wouldn't have met Finn. And without Finn, there would be no story. Shall we begin?"
To read the Category Judges' review of this book click here.
Blood Red Snow White by Marcus Sedgwick (Orion Children's Books)
Beyond the vast plains, deep in the snowy forest, the great bear that is Russia wakes from a long sleep and marches to St Petersburg to claim its birthright. Its awakening will mark the end for the Romanovs, and herald an era that will change the world. Another man played a part in it all. His name was Arthur Ransome, a journalist and writer who left his English home, his wife and daughter, and fell in love with Russia and a Russian woman, Evgenia. This is his story.
To read the Category Judges' review of this book and to comment on it yourself, click here.