Now for the Nibbies ...

And now it's time for the Nibbies, as the British Book Awards are affectionately known, a whole cluster of awards decided by publishers, booksellers and the general public, and reflecting (i think it's fair to say) more popular, rather than rarefied literary, taste.

Among the winners :

Ian McEwan picks up the Galaxy Book of the Year for On Chesil Beach, and Reader's Digest make him Author of the Year.

Richard and Judy vote Khaled Hossieni's A Thousand Splendid Suns, their Book of the Year.

Catherine O'Flynn is Waterstones' Newcomer of the Year.

Kim Edwards' The Memory Keeper's Daughter wins Sainsbury's Book of the Year.

And J.K. Rowling gets the Book People Outstanding Achievement Award.

The complete list of awards and shortlisted titles here.

Lindsay Irvine takes a look at this year's awards in the Guardian.

Beware of Ghosts in the Shopping Mall!

It strikes me that several British novels (all by women) seem to be exploring the same territory: Nicola Barker's Darkmans, Hilary Mantel's Beyond Black and now Catherine O'Flynn's What Was Lost are set in post-industrial landscape which is ugly, dehumanised and despairing, and the ghosts of the past are clawing their way through the fabric of time to meddle with the present.

Catherine O' Flynn sets her novel in a Birmingham shopping mall, Green Oaks (actually the main character in the book) while the ghost in question is that of a ten year-old girl, Kate Meany, who went missing (presumed murdered) back in 1980. She appears one night on the CCTV camera of security guard Kurt, while Lisa (deputy manager of Your Music shop) finds a toy stuffed behind the pipes in a service corridor. The novel unfolds as a kind of whodunnit mystery.

The first section of the book takes place in the year Kate, aged 10, disappeared. The story of little Kate playing at detectives with her stuffed monkey Mickey in tow is charming and Kate and her rebellious friend Theresa are the most fully realised and likable characters in the book. If this first section reads like the start of a children's novel, the story soon moves on to more sinister stuff.

I've always felt that shopping malls despite their surface glitz and glamour have a dark underbelly.

Detour - I can't stay long in the big ones without feeling that I'm going to have a panic attack from all the sensory overload (honestly!). I remember being utterly freaked out 1 Utama car park at night hearing Vivaldi's Four Seasons on the loudspeakers echoing through soulless concrete caverns. It was just like the use of hearing Beethoven's 9th in Stanley Kubrick's film A Clockwork Orange - dismayingly incongruous!

In O'Flynn's novel, Green Oaks (apparently modelled on the Westfield mall) acts as a giant magnet, drawing in the dispossessed and dissatisfied who mooch around the shops all day with nothing better to do and nowhere better to go. O'Flynn is a careful observer, maybe because she herself has worked in retail and been a mystery-shopper and thus experienced of much she writes about, and she is at her best recording the disembodied voices which themselves float, ghost-like, through the mall.

Another detour - I used to work in one of the Birmingham-based shops she mentions in the first section - Midland Educational in their toyshop branch, Barnaby's and there was much in the book that took me back to that time. The utter dead-endness of the job, the petty rivalries between the staff, the sheer exhaustion of having to remain on your feet and be polite to people for hours at a time.

I felt such pain for the poor old man in O'Flynn's book, strung along sadistically for 23 months waiting for his order of a classical cassette that never comes ... because I can remember serving on the most hated counter in the toyshop - the one customers came to for their repairs of Hornby model trains and Scalextric cars. Week after week I'd have to see the same faces, and have to answer the same questions about when their repairs were coming back. And of course politely fob the customers off until the next week. (Oh, I tell you, this book brought back memories!)

Malaysians with their love of shopping malls will definitely be able to relate to the book. It's also an enjoyable, fairly breezy read, although there is such an undercurrent of sadness for what was lost.

And what was lost, in the end? A girl's life, sure, but there are other poignant losses along the way - hope, ambition, self-esteem, a sense of direction.

But perhaps other things are gained. Theresa has Kate to thank for her success in life, and the mystery brings together Kurt and Lisa and shakes them out of their ruts. Above all, the novel ends with a sense of painful things finally being resolved.

The novel is very cleverly and neatly plotted, even if it can be argued (as some readers have) that there is a little too much coincidence at the end. Maybe, in that sense, that makes it a good antidote to Darkmans and Anne Enrights The Gathering where we are left with only loose ends in our hands when we try to conclusively solve the central mystery.

I'm happy for O'Flynn that Tyndall Street Press took a risk on her and look forward to seeing what she does next. The novel, you will recall, was longlisted for the Booker, shortlisted for the Orange Prize and has just won the Costa First Novel Award. Not bad at all!

Here's an interview with O'Flynn bout the book from Brightcove. How nice to hear a Brummy accent again. (I used to have one ...).

Don't Let Rejection Get You Down

I hope it does give people hope. It's very hard to get published and it's hard if you go in there with this burning ambition. I didn't have that, I was protected by my natural pessimism.

Catherine O'Flynn wins this years Costa first novel award for What Was Lost - am account of ghostly goings on in a shopping mall.

(Plan to write about it in a day or two since I've almost finished it ... it's one of the books on my currently-reading pile which has been shoved aside for the you-have-to-read-this- so-you-can write-a-review-or-do an-interview-books. My reading life is complicated! )

Dalya Alberge in the Times reports that O'Flynn weathered rejections from 20 (or is it 14 as the Guardian says ... anyway, an awful lot of) agents before her novel was accepted before it was picked up by Birmingham based small press Tyndall Street Press (whose other publishing success was of course Clare Morrall's Astonishing Splashes of Colour). O'Flynn has worked as a postwoman, in an HMV music store, as a teacher and, briefly, as a mystery shopper.

The judges, which included novelist Joanna Trollope called O'Flynn's novel:

... an extraordinary book ... a formidable novel blending humour and pathos in a cleverly constructed and absorbing mystery.

It also made the Booker longlist last year, you will remember.

The best novel award goes to A.L.Kennedy's Day, a novel which (as again you will remember if you've been paying attention to my blog) made several "best books of 2007 lists". The judges described it as:

... a masterpiece ...

and book makers William Hill announced 2-1 odds on it winning the main prize, to be announced on 22 January.

The winners in the other categories are:

Biography - Simon Sebag Montefiore for Young Stalin
Poetry - Jean Sprackland for Tilt
Children - Ann Kelley for The Bower Bird

The Times includes a disturbing aside about book sales in the UK:

Of 200,000 books sold last year, 190,000 sold fewer than 3,500 copies. More damning still, of 85,933 new books published, as many as 58,325 sold an average of just 18 copies.

Food for thought: the best selling Malaysian titles, in comparison, have done very well indeed.

Further food for thought: if you want to write, don't give up the day job!

Even further food for thought: if at first your manuscript gets rejected, keep on going! (Although you may want to take this advice to heart!)

The Costa website is here but news of the 2008 shortlist is not up yet.

The Costa Reading

It's an all female shortlist for the Costa Book First Novel Award this year with three of the four nominees originally from the Indian subcontinent:

The selected titles are:

A Golden Age by Tahmima Anam
Gifted by Nikita Lalwani
What Was Lost by Catherine O'Flynn
Mosquito by Roma Tearne

Meanwhile the nominees for the Costa Novel Award are:

Skin Lane by Neil Bartlett
Day by A.L. Kennedy
Death of a Murderer by Rupert Thomson
The Road Home by Rose Tremain

Note that there's no overlap at all with the Booker list! The best know of these authors is of course Rose Tremain who wrote Music and Silence, but as Charlotte Higgins points out in the Guardian:

... the other novels on the shortlist display a more offbeat aesthetic: AL Kennedy, Neil Bartlett and Rupert Thomson are all respected writers with form, but whose reputations have perhaps bubbled away without necessarily breaking into the top rank of household names. Bartlett is as well known for his career in opera and theatre directing as for his writing; Kennedy also performs as a stand-up comedian.

You can find out more about each of these titles, and also find the nominees for the poetry, non-fiction and children's award on the Costa Awards website. The winner in each category will be announced January 3rd and the overall winner on January 22nd.

Arifa Akbar in the Independent meanwhile highlights the story of Catherine O'Flynn who was turned down by 15 publishers before Birmingham-based independent Tindal Street Press took her on:

O'Flynn, who has also worked as a teacher, web manager and civil servant, said she wrote her novel almost accidentally. Her creative side was awakened by her work at a shopping centre in the West Midlands. "There were many things about it that made me want to write. The trance-like state of the shoppers consuming everything in their wake, the eeriness of the empty centre at night, the constant awareness of surveillance, the differing experiences of staff and shoppers, the industrial past buried beneath it.

"I kept writing about it – almost obsessively, I really wanted to pin down the essence of the place but at that stage there was no plan for this to be a novel.

"Then I heard a story doing the rounds among the centre security guards of a child being seen on one of the CCTV monitors in the middle of the night and that image stayed with me."

She was longlisted for the Orange and Booker Prizes this year, and is also on the shortlist for the Guardian first book award!