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Costa Book award winners: The critics' verdict
Three war stories, a picaresque romp and a dazzling collection of nature poems are honoured
The winners of the Costa Book Awards were announced last night, gladdening "the heart of anyone who thinks they have left it too late to write their first book", says The Guardian.
A troop of baby boomers, including Sebastian Barry, Keggie Carew, Francis Spufford and Alice Oswald, swept the board.
The five category winners - for best novel, biography, first novel, poetry and children's book - will go into contention for the overall book of the year award, which will be announced on 31 January.
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Barry's novel is set during the 1850s and follows the story of Thomas McNulty and his brother-in-arms John Cole as they fight in the Indian wars and then the US Civil War. The friends experience horrors and wonder and ultimately seek to find happiness amid the tumult and chaos. The Financial Times says it is "not only a story of survival, it is a love story, too, written in a gorgeous style that blends Barry's characteristic eloquence with the straight-talk of early America".
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Biography – Dadland by Keggie Carew
Already known as a fine artist, Carew has now made her mark in the literary world with a debut book about the life of her father, Tom. The biography-meets-detective story traces his decline into dementia and Carew's attempt to piece his early life together from two metal trunks full of letters, photographs, pocket diaries, books and newspaper clippings. The Times calls it a "fascinating mix of military history and family memoir" and notes that while there is "plenty of love sloshing around", there is also a "pleasing, rather shocking, warts-and-all nature to this book".
Spufford was dubbed Sunday Times Young Writer of the Year in 1997 and has since won accolades for his non-fiction. Golden Hill is his first novel. Set in the mid-1700s in a small town on the tip of Manhattan, it follows the adventures of charming young stranger Mr Smith, fresh off the boat from England and wanting to cash a £1,000 bill of exchange. The Guardian calls it an "entertaining and ingenious first novel", both a "picaresque tale of the travails of an ingenue" and "a loving tribute" to the literature of the Henry Fielding era.
Children's Book - The Bombs That Brought Us Together by Brian Conaghan
Scottish-born Dublin-based author Conaghan's second young adult novel looks at the impact of war on those who grow up with it. It tells the story of Charlie, a 14-year-old schoolboy growing up in the oppressive and unstable zone of Little Town who makes friends with a refuge from the Old Country. When war comes, Charlie must decide where his loyalties really lie. The Scotsman calls it "a dark, powerful tale of survival, morality and loyalty" that is "punctuated with smatterings of hilarious off-piste humour".
Devon-based poet Alice Oswald's collection of verse uses images from nature to explore the themes of life, death and decay and the way all that is material is vulnerable to change and loss. The Guardian calls Falling Awake a "dazzling celebration of nature", saying Oswald "delivers us from the quotidian, and offers instead a West Country landscape that is sometimes dreamlike, sometimes pure dream".
