Dystopias, Thrillers, Ghost stories and a Booker Winner make Longlist for Goldsboro Books Glass Bell Award 2020.

Goldsboro Books today (Monday 6th April) announced the twelve titles longlisted for the 2020 Glass Bell Award, the prize which celebrates the best storytelling across contemporary fiction. A longlist which sees an incredible range of genres represented, it includes a Booker-winning exploration of black womanhood in Britain; a speculative thriller which imagines the world 800 years after a complete technological collapse; and two serial killer thrillers – with a twist!

Bernardine Evaristo’s Girl, Woman, Other and Oyinkan Braithwaite’s debut My Sister the Serial Killer are both on the longlist – their latest literary nominations. Both were longlisted for the Booker, ultimately won by Evaristo (jointly with Margaret Atwood) and both have been shortlisted for a British Book Award. In addition, both have been shortlisted for the Women’s Prize, although in different years. They are joined by international bestseller Robert Harris’s latest #1 bestseller The Second Sleep.

Also on the longlist are the long-awaited second novels from Erin Morgenstern, whose debut The Night Circus was a New York Times bestseller eight years ago, and from author and screenwriter Stephen Chbosky, whose hugely successful coming of age novel The Perks of Being a Wallflower was made into a film starring Emma Watson, Logan Lerman and Ezra Miller. Morgenstern’s new novel The Starless Sea is an ambitious fantasy novel about a quest launched by a mysterious library book, described as ‘assuredly beautiful’ by The Guardian, whilst Chbosky’s new novel Imaginary Friend is a departure – a terrifying Stephen King-esque horror story.

As well as My Sister the Serial Killer, four other critically acclaimed debuts have made the longlist: Joanne Ramos’s The Farm, an alarming dystopia about the commercialisation of the fertility industry which was a BBC Radio 2 Book Club pick; The Silent Patient by Alex Michaelides, a million copy bestselling thriller with an unguessable twist; Blood & Sugar by Laura Shepherd- Robinson, a historical crime novel set in eighteenth century, about the disappearance of an abolitionist; and The Lost Ones by Anita Frank, a spine tingling ghost story reminiscent of the works of Susan Hill.

Rounding off the list is Nothing Important Happened Today by international bestseller Will Carver, a pitch black noir thriller about an unstoppable cult; Daisy Jones and the Six, Taylor Jenkins Reid’s breakthrough novel about the internal dramas and excesses of a 70s rock band; and Darkdawn, the epic third and final chapter of Jay Kristoff ’s celebrated Nevernight series.

David Headley, Goldsboro Books co-founder and MD, and founder of the Glass Bell, says: ‘When I launched the Glass Bell Award in 2017, it was to shine a light on the wonderful storytelling found in contemporary fiction, that can so easily be overlooked by subjective genre boundaries. As authors increasingly take risks, play with words, and push the boundaries of genre to new limits, compiling our longlist becomes more and more exciting every year.

‘The books on this year ’s longlist all spoke to our team of judges in many ways. Each one is a genuinely unique tale for our time, from unlikely serial killer thrillers, to tales of rock and roll excess from the 1970s; from terrifying ghost stories to two incredibly different, but nonetheless equally believable and relevant dystopias; four very talented debut novelists and of course the hugely deserving winner of last year’s Booker prize! Narrowing it down to a shortlist of six is both an exhilarating and daunting challenge.’

The Glass Bell Award is judged by David and his team at Goldsboro Books. It is the only prize that rewards storytelling in all genres – from romance, thrillers and ghost stories, to historical, speculative and literary fiction – and is awarded annually to ‘a compelling novel with brilliant characterisation and a distinct voice that is confidently written and assuredly realised’. The shortlist of six will be announced on 11th May, with the winner, who will receive both £2,000, and a beautiful, handmade, engraved glass bell, to be announced on 2nd July.

For further information, and to join the conversation please visit: www.goldsborobooks.com | twitter.com/GoldsboroBooks #GlassBell | www.facebook.com/GoldsboroBooks

2020 LONGLIST

Imaginary Friend by Stephen Chbosky (Orion Books)

Darkdawn by Jay Kristoff (HarperVoyager)

The Starless Sea by Erin Morgenstern (Harvill Secker)

The Lost Ones by Anita Frank (HQ)

My Sister the Serial Killer by Oyinkan Braithwaite (Atlantic Books)

The Farm by Joanne Ramos (Bloomsbury)

Girl, Woman, Other by Bernardine Evaristo (Hamish Hamilton)

The Second Sleep by Robert Harris (Cornerstone)

Blood & Sugar by Laura Shepherd-Robinson (Mantle)

Daisy Jones and the Six by Taylor Jenkins Reid (Cornerstone)

Nothing Important Happened Today by Will Carver (Orenda Books)

The Silent Patient by Alex Michaelides (Orion Books)

Is Blue the Night!

Today’s guest blog is by Eoin McNamee.  The author of seven books he has also written a trilogy for young adults and has been nominated for the Booker Prize with his novel The Blue Tango.  Using the pseudonym John Creed, he has written three crime novels featuring Jack Valentine. The first novel in the series The Sirius Crossing won the inaugural Ian Fleming Steel Dagger.  In 1990, he was awarded the Macauley Fellowship for Irish Literature.

12^th November 1952.  The starting point.  Nineteen-year-old Patricia Curran steps off the bus at the gate to her family home, The Glen, in Whiteabbey outside Belfast.  Later that night her body is found on the driveway, stabbed thirty-seven times.  From the beginning, an air of the occult settling over the murder, of gothic fakery-the occult of Ouija boards and séances in chilly Victorian sitting rooms.

Patricia was beautiful, wilful, spirited.  Her father Lance Curran was a high-flier, Attorney-General at thirty-six, a judge at the time of her death.  He was icy and brilliant, arguably cunning and manipulative, and certainly a gambler, mortgaged to the hilt, up to his neck in it.  Her brother Desmond was a barrister, a street prostletyser, a man who would turn his back on it all to become a missionary priest.  Her mother Doris…where do you start with Doris?  Where do you start with any of them?

Doris and Patricia were not getting on.  Doris was highly strung.  Two weeks after her daughter’s death Doris was sent to a mental hospital where she remained until her death in 1976.  A young airman was wrongfully convicted of Patricia’s murder and had his conviction overturned in 2001.  Fingers have always been pointed at Doris.  Did she kill her own daughter?  Did her husband cover for her?

I’d heard that Doris Curran was brought up in Broadmoor Prison for the Criminally Insane. 

Her father was superintendent.  Researching it, I found that Ripper suspect, Thomas Cutbush was incarcerated there at the same time.  There’s always a moment that fixes a book for you, defines it.  For Blue Is the Night I was reading the physical description of Cutbush in his admission documents.  It describes height, hair colour, and then it comes to the crucial detail.  ‘Eyes: dark blue, very sharp.’  It caught the texture of the book.  A watcher in the shrubberies and ill-lit byways of post war Ulster.  A malice glittering in the provincial shadows.  A loving mother couldn’t take a child’s life (thirty-seven stab wounds) but a paranoid schizophrenic certainly could.

If Doris killed her daughter (and that is by no means certain) she isn’t the only one who transgressed.  Judge Lance Curran put on the black silk cap to hang Robert McGladdery for the murder of nineteen-year-old Pearl Gamble in 1961, nine years after the murder of his own nineteen-year-old daughter, despite the lack of substantive evidence.  Patricia herself becomes a nexus of rumour and counter-rumour, white mischief abroad in a town where pleasure taking was always furtive, always clothed in sin and consequence.

Lance Curran wasn’t always thus.  In 1949, he prosecuted Robert Taylor for the murder of Mary McGowan.  Robert Taylor was a man-child, dead spit of the freckled and wholesome child film star Bobby Breen.  He was also a stone killer who left Mrs McGowan cut, strangled and scalded.  Curran’s prosecution was relentless.  It seemed that Taylor was doomed.  However, would a protestant hang for the murder of a catholic woman in 1949 Belfast?  Moreover, if the answer is no, what happens to the rigorous and fair-minded prosecutor?  Does he shrug his shoulders and go with the cynical flow?

Three cases involving Lance Curran.  Three dead women.  I started haunting the Curran family.  Latterly, they’ve been haunting me.  I wanted to find out who killed Patricia Curran and ended up wondering who she was.  I have her photograph at home the downturned mouth, the eyes in shadow.  At the end of the trilogy I find myself in the vicinity of truth, but fatally drawn away from it by those eyes.  Finding myself lost in the shadow, in their mesmeric void.

Blue is the Night by Eoin McNamee is out now, £12.99 (Faber & Faber)