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Goldsboro Books on Thursday 21st June announced the
thirteen titles long-listed for the 2018 Glass Bell Award, a prize introduced
last year to celebrate the best storytelling across all genres of contemporary
fiction.
Seven debut novelists, including Gail Honeyman for her
remarkable breakout bestseller Eleanor
Oliphant is Completely Fine and Omar El Akkad, author of the
disturbingly prophetic American War,
compete against literary heavyweights John Boyne, Anthony Horowitz and Jon
McGregor. The winner of the prize, which rewards 'compelling storytelling with
brilliant characterisation and a distinct voice that is confidently written and
assuredly realised', will receive both £2,000, and a beautiful, handmade,
engraved glass bell, to be awarded at a party at the bookshop on 27th September
2018.
The full longlist is:
The Heart’s Invisible
Furies by John Boyne (Transworld)
American War by
Omar El Akkad (Picador)
The Nix by Nathan
Hill (Picador)
Eleanor Oliphant Is
Completely Fine by Gail Honeyman (HarperFiction)
The Word is Murder
by Anthony Horowitz (Century)
Good Me Bad Me by
Ali Land (Michael Joseph)
The Innocent Wife
by Amy Lloyd (Century)
You Don't Know Me
by Imran Mahmood (Michael Joseph)
Reservoir 13 by Jon
McGregor (4th Estate)
The Ice by Laline
Paull (4th Estate)
Behind Her Eyes by
Sarah Pinborough (HarperCollins)
The Silent Companions
by Laura Purcell (Bloomsbury Raven)
My Absolute Darling
by Gabriel Tallent (4th Estate)
The prize is judged by Goldsboro Books founder and MD David
Headley and his team at the bookshop, and the six finalists will be announced
on 30th August.
David says: ‘This
hugely impressive longlist celebrates the depth and breadth of contemporary
fiction today. Featuring both established and debut authors, it reflects an
extraordinary range of themes, styles and concerns, from religious intolerance,
climate change and the flaws in our justice system, to the challenges of rural
life and…ghosts! Whittling down these wonderful, pacey and varied novels to
just six will be a tremendously daunting process.’
The winner of the 2017 Goldsboro Books Glass Bell Award was
Chris Cleave, for his extraordinary Everyone
Brave is Forgiven (Sceptre), the moving and unflinching novel about the
profound effects that the Second World War had on ordinary citizens back at
home in Britain.
Celebrated novelist John Boyne, author of The Boy in the Striped Pyjamas, is long-listed
for his sweeping odyssey The Heart’s
Invisible Furies which spans 70 years of modern Irish history.
Leading the debuts on the long-list is Nathan Hill’s
intricate and multi-stranded mystery The
Nix, in which an English professor searches for the truth about his
estranged mother, who has been accused of domestic terrorism.
A remarkable debut novel about a young woman set apart from
society, Eleanor Oliphant Is
Completely Fine by Gail Honeyman has been met with extraordinary
success, hitting The Sunday Times #1 bestseller spot, won the British
Book Awards Debut of the Year, and Book of the Year, as well as being long-listed
for the Women’s Prize.
From the author of the international bestselling teenage spy
Alex Rider series, and whose oeuvre also includes pastiches of both Sherlock
Holmes and James Bond, The Word is
Murder by Anthony Horowitz is a unique and modern mystery,
which sees Anthony himself help solve a crime.
Crime debuts have been very well represented. Ali Land’s
chilling psychological suspense Good
Me Bad Me, about the daughter of a child-killer, has also been a Richard
& Judy pick.
Amy Lloyd won the Daily Mail/Penguin Random House
First Novel Competition with her gripping psychological thriller The Innocent Wife, about a woman who
falls in love with a convicted murderer.
Criminal barrister Imran Mahmood drew on his own
experiences from the courtroom to write You Don’t Know Me, told as a monologue in which a young man accused
of murder addresses the jury directly.
Jon McGregor’s Reservoir
13, a meditation on rural life in the wake of the disappearance of a
teenager, previously won the 2017 Costa Novel Award and the 2018 British Book
Award Fiction Book of the Year, as well as being shortlisted for the Rathbones
Folio Prize and the Goldsmith Prize, and long-listed for the Man Booker Prize.
The Ice is Laline
Paull’s second novel, an environmentally conscious mystery set in the rapidly
warming Arctic.
Previously known for critically acclaimed young adult and
supernatural writing, Sarah Pinborough’s psychological thriller Behind Her Eyes had the entire
internet demanding #wtfthatending
The Silent Companions by Laura
Purcell, was a departure for the historical novelist – a spine-tingling ghost
story, in which a young pregnant widow moves into her late husband’s crumbling
estate, where she is haunted by disturbingly lifelike wooden figures known as
companions...
One of the most talked about debuts of 2017, My Absolute Darling by Gabriel
Tallent is a harrowing story about love, abuse and wilderness.
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