Award Season (Micro Reviews 6 & 7)

 

The International Booker Prize and the Dublin Literary Award

May seems to be a big month for book awards, several prestigious ones have been announced, there's been shortlists galore and just this week Café Nero announced it was starting a new awards (hopefully to replace the much missed Costa award). However just this week two prizes were given out in awards I follow more closely - and to the books I'd have picked which is unheard of!

The International Booker Prize went to Time Shelter by the Bulgaria author Georgi Gospodinov and his translator Angela Rodel (Orion books).

I was about three quarters of the way through this book when it won and I enjoyed it greatly - indeed it was the one that leapt off the shortlist to me initially and the one I made sure to read first when my library reservations came in.

It deals with the idea of recreating rooms and apartments from different eras in time to help those with dementia and other memory problems. These are such a success that people run with the idea at ever bigger scales with scary (but all too believable) results. For me the very end of the book was a little out of balance with the main part but it was still a great read and I am very pleased that it won.

The Dublin Literary Award was awarded to Marzahn Mon Amour by Katja Oskamp and her translator from the German Jo Heinrich (Peirene Press).

I read this book last year and reviewed it here, it also made my 'best of 2022' list and I was very pleased that this won from the shortlist.

The Dublin Literary Award is very different from most as all the books on the longlist are nominated by libraries from around the world, including Norfolk Libraries. We put Lessons in Chemistry forward this year (along with a few libraries) and while we made the longlist it got no further. One year we'll predict the winner!

Micro Review 5 (2023)

 

Black Butterflies by Priscilla Morris (Duckworth Books)

I was quite excited by the Women's Prize longlist this year as several books I'd read and loved were on it, sadly when it came to the shortlist none of these made the cut, and (contrary to every other reader I've met) the one I had read wasn't a hit with me at all.

On reading the blurbs for the others I want to try some of them but it was Black Butterflies that instantly caught my eye - the striking cover also helped with this!

After the fall of the Berlin Wall one of my other big historical memories of the 1990s is the conflict in the Balkans. We had our first family holiday abroad in 1990 and we went to Yugoslavia. We loved the place and planned on going back in 1991 but then Croatia declared independence shortly before our holiday and we ended up in Mallorca (quite a different location!). Following on from this declaration the area descended in to various conflicts, including the siege of Sarajevo, the setting for this novel.

This book details the siege through the eyes of Zora - an artist and teacher in Sarajevo, it starts before things descend in to utter chaos and Zora is able to get her husband and elderly mother out of the city to relatives in England but she remains in the city to tidy up the loose ends. Before she can leave the airport is closed and the city besieged.

The book focuses very much on the daily life of the people trapped in the city, the general violence, the hunger and the fear - it is not particularly about any sectarian divides and definitely not about neighbours turning on neighbours - and I found it utterly compelling and very hard to put down.

Parts of the books are quite gruesome but are definitely not gratuitous, and I also liked that through Zora's eyes you see how you can become desensitised to anything in extreme situations. Not an easy read but a book I'm really pleased to have read. The Balkan conflicts have faded in our memories and this book shows that Sarajevo in the 1990s wasn't that different to the WW2 sieges of Leningrad and Stalingrad and deserve to be remembered.

Quick reads don't mean easy reads

 

Brilliant Books by Barrington Stoke

I've been quite open here on the blog, and in real life, about the struggles I had with reading a few years ago and how much I support initiatives such as the Quick Reads books for adults. Over the past year or so I've been reading more books aimed at children and young adults who also experience difficulties with reading - whether through dyslexia or other reasons.

When I was a bookseller I was aware of Barrington Stoke as a publisher and really admired their work but they did slip completely off of my radar until recently when I rediscovered them thanks to the brilliant WW2 inspired books by Tom Palmer whose books I've blogged about before.

More recently I've been looking at their forthcoming books more closely and discovered that some of my favourite writers have published books with them. 

Ravencave - Marcus Sedgewick

Marcus Sedgewick, who sadly died recently, was the very first author I ran an event with when his novel Floodland was published back in 2000 and I'd only been a bookseller for about 6 months. Well ahead of its time Floodland was the first Cli-Fi book I came across and I loved that it had an East Anglian setting however I digress...one of Sedgewick's last books was Ravencave  and its published by Barrington Stoke.

This is a clever tale that right until 3/4 of the way through made me think it was going to be one type of book when in fact it was quite a different tale altogether. It is also written in clear, simple language with some evocative images to help move the tale along. The publisher rates it as having an interest level of 11+ but a reading age of 8+ and wow - if a book that is written to such incredible margins can surprise me to the extent it did what a powerful piece of writing it is!

Jodie - Hilary McKay

Another author I have loved for years (bust sadly haven't yet been fortunate enough to meet although Kentishbookboy did and got a book signed for me!) and who has written an incredibly good book for Barrington Stoke that is just published.

In this book a class is on a residential trip to a nature reserve and Jodie, who is a new pupil at the school, is out of her depth and unhappy which leads to all sorts of adventures and accidents. Something has happened in Jodie's past but this isn't discussed in the book at all,  as this isn't a book about what has happened or what will happen tomorrow it is all about what is happening right now which makes it a fascinating read and very different from the normal type of book I read.

I can imagine that the immediacy of the narrative, the action and the edge of your seat adventure/ghost story will all help reluctant readers discover a page turner. What is incredible is how McKay has managed to create such a feeling of place (a presumably North Sea) salt marsh within such  a short tale and not got bogged down (pun intended) in description.

I'm in awe of all authors anyhow but the skill needed in creating th

is type of book is incredible and I can't wait to explore more books from Barrington Stoke, whether from writers I already know or ones that are new to me!