Murder at Mansfield Park – Lynn Shepherd

It doesn’t happen very often that a TV drama erases any interest I have in a classic novel but ITV’s 2007 adaptation of Mansfield Park did.   Being a completist with ambitions of reading all of Jane Austen’s novels, of course, I thawed and last year  listened to an unabridged audio.  Well, what a surprise, the book was nowhere near as awful as I’d expected and in fact, I found the, by reputation, priggish Fanny Price quite likeable and sensible.  I may have been in a strange state of mind at the time but nevertheless I’m afraid Lionel Trilling’s statement Nobody, I believe, has ever found it possible to like the heroine of Mansfield Park did not hold true.  It most certainly did though when I read Lynn Shepherd’s literary homage.

For ne’er did a more sharp-tongued, insulting and condescending shrew inhabit the pages of a literary mystery.  Breathtaking in her badness and when Fanny Price à la Shepherd ends up dead, I defy any reader to shed a tear.  Just desserts and all that.  (Well, actually I can think of a more fitting punishment   – someone should have married her to Heathcliffe. I know I’m mixing my Austens with my Brontes but if anyone deserves that kind of living hell, then it’s this madame.)

But I’m writing an alternative story here and that may suggest that Shepherd’s take isn’t satisfying. That’s not where I’m heading at all.  For Shepherd has turned Austen’s original on its head while still retaining elements of the original.   Fanny is filthy rich and evil with it.  Mary Crawford is poor but morally good but not in a cloying goody-two-shoes way. Edmund’s still a bit of wet rag, when all’s said and done.  Austenesque plot elements are retained (the conventions of polite society, the play, the ball, the match making, an elopement, the happy ending) but the curtain is opened on unsavoury realities when servants are allowed to speak of their masters.  The murder mystery (and like all good crime novels, once there is one corpse, the body count keeps rising ….), the detective who’s not above bullying his way to the truth  and the style,  that could have been Austen’s own,  add up to a playful mix of elements that makes this novel succeed  where P D James’s Death Comes to Pemberley does not.  Even if it takes a while to get going and the mystery is easily resolved, it’s a delight discovering which trick Shepherd is going to perform next.  The cast from Mansfield Park were never so versatile and the characters from other Austen classics so generous with their cameo performances.

I don’t think you need to know Austen’s original to enjoy this but you’ll enjoy it all the more, if you do.

Oscar and Lucinda – Peter Carey

Winner 1988 Booker Prize and 1989 Miles Franklin Prize.

It’s funny isn’t it how sometimes a novel simply does not call out to be read. All I knew about Oscar and Lucinda, apart from its prize winning credentials, was that it was the story of two gamblers. Not for me, even if it was written by one of the greats of Australian literature. I owned my paperback copy for years – it came as part of a set. I hadn’t consciously bought it. Then the Folio Society put their edition in the sale for less than a tenner … at that price it would make a lovely edition to my FS collection. Then Kim announced Australian Literature Month and Gaskella decided that she would read it. Sometimes the universe must send many signals before I realise that this is a must read and that its reputation is, in fact, very well deserved.  This process seems so appropriate to a novel that examines luck, chance and providence in all its many guises.

What was I expecting? A desperado tale set in the gun-slinging, drunken Australian outback perhaps? (No idea if they slung guns in Australia – apologies if not, there’s no accounting for my imagination …) I certainly didn’t expect to start on the Devon coast with the story of a young boy and his Plymouth Brethren minister father. A father whose heart he broke by defecting to become an Anglican minister and a compulsive gambler. (Horses – he was fortunate – his winnings paid his way through college … even if he did cut a shambolic figure.)

Lucinda’s life starts in the outback. Orphaned at the tender age of 17, she inherits the proceeds from the sale of her parent’s farm, promptly goes to the city and buys herself a glass factory. (It does make sense in the context of the novel.) The money secures her an independence that other women could only dream of  (though tellingly not the respect of her workers) and by degrees she turns into a feisty and headstrong madam. Albeit lonely and so begin her various dalliances at the card tables.

How do these two meet? Well the reader must have patience. Carey is in no rush and tells the parallel stories of their childhood and youth with meticulous precision, taking as much care to ensure that the secondary characters are as real as the principals. So Oscar’s father, Theophilus (meaning lover of God), isn’t simply the principled zealot that the incident with the Christmas pudding would imply. He is a lover of God’s creation, a meticulous marine biologist, and a successful minister. He has been poaching Reverend Stratton’s congregation and so, when Oscar, convinced (by the throw of a stone) that his father is misguided, runs to Reverend Stratton with a request to convert, it is to the Reverend and his wife, a gift from God …. even if they can’t really afford to bring the boy up.

This sets the pattern for Oscar. In pursuing his own aims, he unconsciously ruins the lives of others. There’s certainly no malice in anything Oscar does, nor is there much forward planning. After college, on the toss of a coin, he decides to emigrate to Australia but to get there he must board the ship. The embarkation scenes are pure gold. Oscar’s lifelong fear of water renders him powerless. Carey has manoeuvered Lucinda to be on the same ship.

The rain started again, heavily, and the ganway ahead would not clear. She lifted her umbrella to see properly, peering up from the fourth step. It would appear that there were problems with an invalid. She recognised the red-haired clergyman as the one who had arrived in a hansom, or, rather recognised the hair. It was he who was the invalid. She thought it strange they should carry a man backwards up a gangplank. But then, as she watched, she saw they were no longer going up, but coming down. And this was how she first saw Oscar, altough there was not a lot to see because he had his hands pressed to his face.

Chapter 46 and Lucinda sets eyes on Oscar.  It’s not an auspicious start, is it?  As they journey towards Australia, they discover each other’s love of gambling and begin to play cards together, unaccompanied in Lucinda’s cabin.  This establishes the careless pattern of their relationship  which eventually (the languorous pace continues once the shores of Australia are reached) sees Lucinda ruin Oscar’s life.    She must become his protectoress.  As luck would have it, she’s in a position to become just that. Eventually however, their friendship deepens but somehow or other their future together and Lucinda’s fortune becomes dependent on Oscar delivering a glass church into the outback.  (Yes, a glass church in the heat of Australia – completely fantastical in the midst of a novel more on a par with mid-19th century realism).

By which time the denouement has been foreshadowed.  It’s just a matter of detail and detail is where Carey excels.  (For example, I didn’t know that about the side-effects of laudanum!)  The pages turn a little faster during this final adventure which is led by Oscar’s archenemy Mr Jeffries who

was amused at Mr Smudge (derogatory nickname for Oscar) preparing for anything.  He had never, in his whole experience, met anyone so mentally and physically unprepared for life. 

Mr Jeffries’s assessment of Oscar is correct.  Unprepared for life, completely ill-equipped for adventure.  This escapade is always going to be a case of snatching defeat out of the jaws of victory and it raises the supreme irony of this being the one thing that Oscar manages supremely well.   (Or does it?  Is chance, fate or whatever you care to call it, finally settling the bill?)

This novel held me in its thrall.  It made me laugh.  I didn’t cry but I certainly felt the heartache of some in places. If I hadn’t banned myself from rereading this year, I would probably go back to the beginning and start again to pick up all the nuances that are woven into its tapestry. I will do that sometime (perhaps when I persuade my book group to read it) but meanwhile I’ll just link to John Mullan’s excellent analysis ( 1) Chance   2) Visualisation   3) Origins   4) Reader’s Responses ) and a podcast in which he talks to Carey about the novel.

The first    of 2012!  I hope I didn’t gush too much.

Thanks to Kim and Gaskella for the providing the impetus I needed to pick this up.

Bookshelves #2

Just popping in to say the new shelves are here and that I’m busy building my library.

Now, if someone can tell me how to make a time-lapse video like this one, I may be able to share the experience at a later date.

Thyme Running Out – Panama Oxridge

One of the most anticipated releases for me in 2011 was a children’s book – the 4-year long awaited sequel to The Thief of Time, which was released in September and then sat in the TBR until such time as I could once again lose myself in time-travel, time curves and loops without distractions of any kind.

The sequel didn’t disappoint.  It’s just as inventive, entertaining and in places downright bonkers as the first novel.  I’ll not give too much away plotwise but this time the stakes are higher. Time travel is a dangerous business and the father of Justin Thyme (child genius and billionaire) wishes he’d never invented a time machine.  His family has been endangered ever since.  His son, however, is much more reckless less risk-adverse but then he needs to be if he is to rescue his sister from the time loop that … can’t say.  I will reveal, however,  that the archenemy is an evil so-and-so, the toddler is enough to make you yearn for a return to those sleepless nights and the nanny, words fail me. Just how do you describe someone who can sideline a talking gorilla!

The book is targetted for readers aged 9 and above.  See, I do qualify.  And very clever 9 nine year olds they’d need to be to keep in step with with the twists and turns, the intertextual clues as to what is going to happen next and the challenging vocabulary.

Most of his equipment was already packed – however, he stll needed to construct a simple handheld sonar device he could use to summon Nessie.  He hoped that by transmitting a specific NBHF burst-pulse before each feeding session, she’d eventually learn to come when “called”.  Of course, this was assuming plesiosaurs were biosonar – but from what he had seen of fossilied specimens, their lower jaw structure certainly indicated a rudimentary use of echolocation.

I wasn’t quite sure about the complexity of the vocabulary when I read Book One, but as can be seen in the interview over on The Book Zone, it’s the author’s intention to challenge his young (and btw his not so young audience) in this respect.  Fortunately there’s a mini-dictionary in the appendix.   Which is indicative of the minute attention to detail to all aspects of the book – not just the plot. The cover and text are illustrated by the author himself and there are as many clues in these as there are in the text.  There are also spare pages at the back for the supersleuths to record clues and suspects and their theories as to what is happening not only in this book but what will happen in the next.  (I just hope that I won’t need to do some time-travelling to get my hands on it before another 4 years pass ….)

As if there wasn’t enough to delight, Justin Thyme also offers a very specific explanation for the extinction of the dodo ….  I have always wondered about that.

Book Shelves #1: 15.01.2012 Recorded for Posterity

So when I say that I have 2000+ books and no shelves, you realise that I’m exaggerating, don’t you?  Relatively speaking, though, it is true.  According to librarything I need the equivalent of 13 large Billy bookcases.  As it is I actually have 4 makeshift shelves, which house my Folio Society collection and a few well-deserving interlopers ….

These shelves proved surprisingly sturdy (double-stacked with luxurious Folios, they needed to be, but they are about to be dismantled forever – to make way for 8 tall and narrow Billy bookcases. (Billy, I hope you know what you’re in for!)

I thought it only fitting and fair  to record their 10 years of dutiful service.

In the spirit of the series started by  Biblioklept and picked up by Time’s Flow Stemmed let’s home in and discuss a few of these books in more detail.

Starting with my favourite – surprisingly easy to pick actually.

This is an English version of the Latin Bestiary (Bodleian library, Oxford M.S Bodley 764), containing all the original illustrations in facsimile.  It is a fascinating insight into the medieval mind in which the animal kingdom is catalogued according to type with explanation of their purpose in the education and instruction of sinful man.   I’m afraid my favourite bird – the owl – does not fare well.

The screech-owl get its name from the sound of its cry.  It is a bird associated with death, burdened with feathers, but bound by a heavy laziness, hovering around graves by day and night, and lighting in caves.  Ovid says of it “A sluggish screech-owl, a loathsome bird, which heralds impending disaster, a harbinger of woe for mortals.” (Metamorphoses v. 550); For among the augurs it was said to foreshadow evil.  The screech-owl is an image of all those who yield to the darkness of sin and flee the light of justice.  Hence it is counted among the unclean creatures in Leviticus.  The screech-owl is the symbol of all sinners.

Oh, dear.  Fortunately my favourite domestic animal, the dog, fares much better with 4 pages of anecdotal evidence of love and loyalty.  Mythical creatures are also included although it’s hard to say from the text whether the writer believed in these or not.

The phoenix is known to live in certain places in Arabia and to live for five hundred years ….

Sirens, so the naturalists tell us, are deadly creatures, which from thehead down to the navel, are like men, but their lower parts down to their feet are like birds …

You see my problem.  As soon as I pick up this volume, it is almost impossible to put it down again ….

Move on though I must to the most disappointing.  Again, quite easy.  I collect Folio Society books for their design, the quality in the binding, the pages, the cover and, as evidenced from above, the joy of illustration.  So a couple of years ago, when I received the gorgeous, shiny, beauty on the right and opened it to discover not a single illustration within, I was mortified.  Apparently Patrick Suskind didn’t want an illustrator to impose his/her vision of Perfume on reader’s minds.  Fair enough, but be consistent with this. Why refuse book illustrations when you’ve sold the film rights?  (Btw I love the novel and I adore the film also.)

I’ve been building up my collection of Folio Society books for 9 years (most of them have been acquired quite cheaply from 2nd hand outlets – I don’t understand why these lovely books don’t hold their price.).  The first FS edition I bought is on the far right of this selection.

I purchased To Kill A Mockingbird when I decided to treat myself while rereading for the BBC Big Read in 2003.  It was also the start of my online presence (although it took a few years before Lizzy was born).  As we say the rest is history.

On the left is my most recent acquisition.  Preordered in November, it arrived yesterday, hot off the presses: Margaret Atwood’s A Handmaid’s Tale, which I’m itching to reread, particularly as the illustrations are superb and really drawing me in.  But it is embargoed until April thanks to the TBR Dare.  Sandwiched between these two are a number of other Folios to be read, if I’m ever to finish my 100 years, 100 books, 100 authors 20th Century Challenge.  This TBR Dare milarkey is a good opportunity to crack on with that and simultaneously cheer on Simon of Stuck-in-A-Book and his cohorts in their own version of this challenge: A Century of Books.  So that’s what I’ll be doing in the next few weeks – when I’m not dismantling the old shelves and working out how best to organize the new.

Bereft – Chris Womersley

Do you know, Quinn, there isn’t even a word for a parent who has lost a child.  Strange, isn’t it?  You would think, after all these centuries of war and disease and trouble, but no, there is a hole in the English language.  It is unspeakable.  Bereft.

So speaks a mother dying of  Spanish influenza to her son, who has just returned after a 10-year involuntary absence.  Forced to abandon his home when he is accused  by none other than his father and his uncle of the rape and murder of his younger sister.  It’s easy to understand the desolation of this mother, losing both son and daughter in this foul way and then her third child who moves away to escape the burden of memory.

She’s not alone in her emotional devastation.  Quinn, the accused is similarly bereft.  Cut loose from his home, forced to flee as he doesn’t have the capability to stand and fight the wrong done to him.  He travels Australia, odd-jobbing from one state to the next, enlisting when war breaks out, to land in the trenches of WWI France.  His experience renders him psychologically stronger than many others. On the ships back home;

Sometimes blokes clambered onto the railing and launched themselves into the air, arms flailing as they fell to the water, perhaps a glistening head before it went under for the final time, never to be seen again.  A dark, wide mouth inhaling a last breath, lured by the enchantress Morgan le Fay into her palace beneath the waves.  Quinn imagined these men descending into her dim and peaceful realm with seaweed about their necks, garlanded with bubbles, free of the earth and its mortal woes.

When Quinn arrives back in his own neck of the woods, he meets strange little Sadie Fox.  A 12-year old orphan, awaiting the return of her older brother from the war. Vulnerable but knowing.  Attuned to the natural world and its superstitions.  Creator of charms to protect from a known enemy.  Protector of and tormentor of Quinn, who appears amazingly innocent in comparison.  The troubled development of the relationship between her and Quinn into a symbiotic one makes up the core of this novel.

For a good 2/3rds of the novel I was never quite sure whether Sadie is real or a figment of Quinn’s imagination as she frequently takes on characteristics of his dead sister Sarah. This blurring of the edges  adds a ghostly, gothic element to the narrative but more importantly it reflects Quinn’s less-than-clear thought processes, his confusion. Even 10 years on, he still doesn’t possess the wherewithall to resolve the situation on his own initiative.  Without Sadie as a driving force, he wouldn’t stand a chance.

The identity of the his sister’s murderer is not the issue - this is revealed very early on.  The question is whether justice will be served at long, long last.   While  the novel held me rivetted, I found the ultimate resolution anti-climatic.  One death shrouded in the dubiety prevalent elsewhere.  Was it suicide or  murder?  If the former, it’s a tad too convenient.  The final showdown didn’t provide the public vindication I was seeking.  On the other hand, the myths that result from the author’s ending are more attuned to the atmospheric intent of the whole.

There is an exceptionally strong sense of time and place, with the Australian countryside a presence in its own right.  Other reviews have suggested echoes of and a homage to Cormac McCarthy.  While I didn’t find Bereft as visceral as The Road, there’s no denying that Womersley’s post-WWI Australia certainly shares elements of McCarthy’s apocalyptic nightmare.

Bereft is Chris Womersley’s second novel and won the 2011 ABIA Literary Fiction Book of the Year and the 2011 Indie Award for Best Fiction Novel.  It is published in the UK by Quercus today. My thanks to the publishers for the unsolicited review copy and to Kim of Reading Matters for Australian Literature Month.  Without either, I doubt I would have made this very enjoyable discovery.

P.S  If you fancy reading this for yourself, Kim is also hosting a giveaway.

TBR Double Dare and Book Cull Week One

Biblioklept started a series last week about books in their natural habitats.  I thought I’d do the same – except that the majority of my books are in very unnatural habitats.  Boxes, carrier bags, underbed storage.  I had a look around and decided it really is time to build a library and that there is no way I can show you the state of things as they currently are. Particularly when the spare room – the one that is earmarked to become a library with bookshelves as opposed to a library with bookstacks on the floor  - has just been cleared out to make room for houseguests.  The good side of this is that the space is now available to build bookshelves in.  It’s now or never.   So I tootled to IKEA yesterday and ordered 8 bookcases. By the end of the month I should hopefully have some beautiful photos to share.

While I was clearing out the spare room, I started to cull the Himalayan TBR.  The first pass, asking myself ”which books am I no longer interested in reading?” resulted in the cull of a staggeringly impressive total of …. 12.  I can see this exercise is going to be difficult and clearly calls for an altogether different question, something on the lines of  “which books am I going to read in the next 12 months?”.  Of course,  I’ll pretend I can speed read when I’m answering the question. books.  That way I’ll end up with a TBR for the next 5 years and half the TBR should cull itself automatically.  Well, that’s the theory ….. I’ll report back on the practice in due course.

Such distraction has meant that week one of the TBR Double Dare and Book Buying Ban has passed with hardly a temptation.  Well, almost. The Book People catalogue arrived and they’re selling Alison Weir’s Mary Boleyn for a really, really silly price.   Then Andrew Miller’s Pure won the Costa Best Novel.  It’s a beautifully designed book as well and I’ve had my eye on it for a while.  However, I resisted with the aid of the online library catalogue.  The public library has both and they will still be available once the TBR Double Dare is ended.

Week One Summary:  Books Read from TBR: 2 Books Bought: 0 Books Added to Library Reservations List: 2 Books Culled: 12

The Cleansing Flames – R N Morris

Nothing like the end of a year to finish a series – in this case, the quartet of historical crime novels featuring Porfiry Petrovich,  the investigator originally brought to the page by Fyodor Dostoevsky.  Each of the novels has been set in a different season and so now it is spring, 1872,  and the Winter Canal in St Peterburg is beginning to thaw.  A body , trapped beneath the ice all winter, rises to the surface and the ensuing investigation leads Petrovich and his sidekick, Virginsky, into the path of the terrorist cells who are seeking to foment revolution against the tsar.

It is a life-threatening investigation for both men.  Virginsky finds himself torn between two masters.  Secretly sympathetic to the revolutionary cause, he only becomes serious about cracking the case when a terrorist outrage causes the deaths of 5 innocent children.  He decides that the only way to make inroads into the case, is to infiltrate one of the terrorist cells.  So he and Petrovich pull a stunt that in its turn has unforeseen consequences ….

At this point, after an admittedly slow start, the novel becomes very interesting indeed.  Virginsky, for all his atheistic arrogance  and worldly bravado, is quite simply out of his depth.  The clue is in his name.  An amateur even in a drinking den, he has neither the wiles nor the wherewithall to convince ruthless terrorists that he isn’t a plant.  So his life really does hang in the balance and it’s this that gives the novel its tension.

Not the book to read  if you’re looking for a quick pageturning whodunnit.  The substance is to be found in the theological, political and intellectual arguments.  This may be St Petersburg 1972 and the objective of the forthcoming revolution the overthrow of the Tsar, but the arguments for and against violent political actions of this sort are universal and timeless.   As indeed are the ramifications of such actions.  Revolutionary zeal, often conceived in the theoretical arguments of the intelligensia, rarely looks so attractive once it has translated to the ugliest of actions on the ground.

Yet, Morris ends this novel on a conciliatory note, one which I cannot pass unremarked as I found the penultimate paragraph surprisingly touching and for the first time I’d like to know more of Virginsky.

So ends a marvellous series, the first that I have read and reviewed in toto.   I’ll return to it, for sure, as I’m sure it will reward rereading, such is the depth of the historical tapestry woven. Before that, however, there is a hint to be taken from the author’s acknowledgements.

My greatest debt is to Fyodor Mikhailovich Dostoevsky.  Porfiry Petrovich is his character, of course, not mine.  If this book encourages even one reader to turn to Dostoevsky’s great novel Crime and Punishment for a brush with the original Porfiry, then perhaps I will be forgiven for my shameless purloining.

Revisiting the original Crime and Punishment and acquainting myself with the other Dostoevskian masterpieces on which Morris has based his series will keep me occupied though I can’t help but wonder what Morris will pen next.

2012: Starting reasonably

I wrote so many words about 2011 (Personal Highlights, Slicing and Dicing and The Best Of) because I suspect- nay, I know – that I will struggle to match that level of commitment to the world of reading and blogging during 2012.

The main reason is that the time will not be available as once my house guests have departed next week,  I’m embarking on a new non-reading (!) challenge.

Objective 1: I aim to become a teacher of English as a foreign language.  This is an insurance policy as I’m not at all sure of the security of my job in the UK public sector.

Objective 2: I will build my library.  It’s a known fact that you cannot stack as many books on the shelves as you can in piles on the floor and so this will naturally lead to

Objective 3: a major cull of the TBR mountain range, currently of Himalayan proportions.  I want to reduce it so that proportionately it’s more like the Bavarian Alps.  I think my public library will be the main benefactor here. My reasoning being that I can borrow back the books that I suddenly have a craving to read once they’ve left the house …..

Objective 4:  Be reasonable as regards the blog.  I have no intention of quitting (I enjoy it far too much) but in view of  objective 1) I may find it a struggle to maintain my already modest target of 2 posts per week.  For the next while this may reduce to 1 post – possibly of the round-up variety – per week.  If that happens, I will not regard it as a failure.

Objective 5:  More reasonableness regarding reading targets.  I may have read 100 books last year but I think I’ll be lucky to manage 50 this year – particularly as the books calling me loudest right now are either chunksters (Our Mutual Friend (832 pages), Wolf among Wolves (793 pages) and Oscar and Lucinda (519)) or written in German.

Objective 6: I will stop being lazy and I will read at least 2 books written in German. I’ve made a start on this – I’m one chapter into last year’s German Book Prize Winner  – Eugen Ruge’s In Zeiten des Abnehmenden Lichts (426 pages).

Objective 7:  Triumph during the TBR Double Dare.   Not only will I read from my vast TBR for the next 3 months but neither will I buy anything new. I know the TBR Double Dare isn’t officially a book-buying ban, but it is chez Lizzy.  It makes no sense adding to a TBR that is in the process of being culled.  Follow my progress on the side bar to the right —->

So there are my objectives for the first three months of this year.  Let’s revisit on April 1st if only to see just how big a fool I’ve made of myself.

2011: Books of the Year

If you saw my 2011 statistics post, you’d know that I awarded the 5-star accolade to 10 books this year – which should make this award-giving ceremony a cinch.  But that would be far too predictable – I like my awards to be spread across the spectrum of my reading, to recognise the best in the different categories read in a particular year.

Those who wish to know which were the 5-star books should pop over to my virtual library where I’ve rated all the books I read in 2011.

Now though let’s move to the Lizzy’s annual award-giving ceremony.

Catering is courtesy of The Hummingbird Bakery Cake Days which provided the dessert inspiration at this year’s dinner parties.  Would you like a slice of Lemon Meringue Sponge or Summer Strawberry Cheesecake?  The diet doesn’t start until tomorrow, after all!

Moving swiftly onto a less calorific baker’s dozen (though I suppose that depends on how you feed and water yourself while reading …..)

Audio Book of the Year/Short Story Collection of the Year: Talking Heads - Alan Bennett

Best Published in 2011: The Sense of An Ending – Julian Barnes

Biggest Surprise:  Selected Writings - Heinrich von Kleist (Edited by David Constantine)

Comic Read of the Year: Baby Barista and the Art of War  - Tim Kevan

Crime Read of the Year: Dark Matter – Juli Zeh

Discovery of the Year:  The Foxes Come At Night – Cees Nooteboom

Historical Read of the Year: Wolf Hall – Hilary Mantel

Non-Fiction Read of the Year: Dead Sharp – Len Wanner

Novella of the Year: Down the Rabbit Hole – Juan Pablo Villabolos

So-Good-I-Read-It-Twice: Next World Novella – Matthias Politycki

The One That Got Under My Skin: Great House – Nicole Krauss

The One I’m Kicking Myself For Not Reading Earlier: Resistance – Owen Sheers

Twentieth-Century Classic of the Year: The Slaves of Solitude – Patrick Hamilton

Awarding the Book of the Year was actually a very tough call with the 2011 Booker winner battling it out with the 2009 Booker Winner.  In the end though any fight between the respective protagonists, Tony Webster and Thomas Cromwell, would only have one winner. Hence -

Winner – 2009 Man Booker Prize

Winner – 2009 National Book Critics Circle Award for fiction

Winner – 2010 Walter Scott Prize for historical fiction

Winner – 2010 Tournament of Books

Winner – 2011 Book of the Year (Lizzy’s Literary Life)