This year's Category Award Winners are:
2009 Costa Novel Award Winner
Colm Toibin - Brooklyn
Judges: "Poised, quiet and incrementally shattering - we all loved this book and can't praise it highly enough."
2009 Costa First Novel Award Winner
Raphael Selbourne - Beauty
Judges: "Pitch perfect on every level - we loved this book."
2009 Costa Biography Award Winner
Graham Farmelo - The Strangest Man
Judges: "The extraordinary mind and achievements of Britain's Einstein are rendered here in the most compelling biography of the year."
2009 Costa Poetry Award Winner
Christopher Reid- A Scattering
Judges: "Intensely moving, compelling and honest - this is a highly readable collection of wonderful poems."
2009 Costa Children's Book Award Winner
Patrick Ness - The Ask and the Answer (Chaos Walking, Book Two)
Judges: "From the first word, we were gripped by this dazzlingly-imagined, morally complex, compulsively-plotted tale. We are convinced that this is a major achievement in the making."
More to read here
4 comments:
I read Brooklyn last summer and enjoyed it. Maybe because my parents and moved to Brooklyn in the late 50's it resonated slightly. Haven't read any of the other "Costa Winners" though. Might look out for "Beauty".
Not a massive CT fan myself. A little flat or something - although his dialogue rocks.
Brooklyn was on my to-read list after looking at the review in The Independent last year (British one - not the Irish one). A low-key take on historical fiction apparently where the characters are more involved with the daily grind of life than the world events that they are part of... I can't bare the kind of novels where the characters sit around the tea table discussing current events for the readers' benefit. Now he has won the Costa I might actually go out & get hold of a copy -- the power of awards I suppose. I enjoyed The Blackwater Lightship - does seem to create real people living in a real world
I read Brooklyn last summer too but and it was a case for me of 'so what?' when I finished it. I loved Blackwater Lightship and The Master but there is just something about Brooklyn that leaves me cold. CT's had wonderfully crafted sentences but his p.o.v is often odd, a little reticent and cold. I can see why he does it but it makes it hard for this reader to empathize with his characters. He does write women well though, particularly women of an older generation.
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