2016 Book of the Year
Laura Tisdall's Echoes​

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​A startlingly original book set in the world of computers, portraying socially awkward Mallory, who has a phobia of being touched that limits her ability to negotiate the world.  She only feels comfortable with a computer keyboard in front of her, so strongest connections are with a secret organisation of apparently benign hackers.  It is a rip-roaring, fast moving story, cleverly constructed and extremely exciting.  The members of Mallory’s family, who have their own share of difficulties, are portrayed with sympathy and compassion.
This is a multi-faceted book with a compelling narrative drive, an exploration of  loyalty and betrayal, with an unusual insight into the minds of teenagers who can sometimes seem like aliens.  The relationship between the two 16 year old characters, Mallory and Warden, who experience a gradual desire to draw strength from each other, despite a struggle to cope with physical connection, is touching.  This is a book that is good enough to be enjoyed by readers of all ages. 
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We are delighted to announce our Category Winners!
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Emma Purshouse and Catherine Pascall Moore

Annie Dawid

Lisa Woollett

Poetry Winner
Emma Purshouse and Catherine Pascall Moore
I Once Knew a Poem Who Wore a Hat

Fiction Winner
Annie Dawid
York Ferry

Non Fiction Winner
Lisa Woollett
Sea Journal

Children's and YA Winner
Laura Tisdall
Echoes

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The 2016 Category Shortlists
​ Congratulations to all those listed!

​The categories below are broad categories but please be assured that every entry was judged against its own context and not in a broader way. These categories are used as vehicle to list some of the best books we received. However, even some special books did not make the lists due to the fact that not all the judges agreed with each other.

Poetry

​Audubon's Engraver Peter Huggins
A beautifully presented collection by an American poet shortlisted for the Rubery Prize in 2014.  Some of the poems illuminate everyday situations, like the Pathology of Everyday Life (to quote one of the titles).  Many others take historical or fabled situations and characters - Aeneas, Odysseus, Beethoven and Geronimo, Michelangelo and Socrate and invite us to look at them afresh.  Huggins’ quizzical and sympathetic writing always finds new angles on sometimes surprising subjects.
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Plenty-Fish Sarah James
Full of piercing and original imagery, Sarah James’s Plenty-Fish shows a mature and erudite poet, unafraid to explore a variety of poetic forms and fascinated by the elusive quality of words.  There are cross references to popular culture, science and literature here, which give a wonderfully rich texture to James’s poems.  In addition she demonstrates the wonderful ability to take risks and the courage to tackle painful as well as joyous personal experiences.   

I Once Knew a Poem who Wore a Hat ​Emma Purshouse and Catherine Pascall Moore
Lots of wonderful imaginative and outrageous poems in this collection which is full of the charms and idiosyncrasies of childhood.  It’s easy to see how children could love these breezy poems and become attached to them.  One could easily imagine them being learnt by heart and repeated in playgrounds.  The illustrations by Catherine Pascall Moore are quirky and appropriate.  The hints about, for example, the best way to learn a poem or how to speak a poem aloud, are unusual in a book of this sort and never patronising.  

What Snakes Want Kits Shantris
This is a collection of original and sharply-observed poetry from an accomplished, well-read and widely-published US poet.  There are some wonderful, dark and unsettling pieces here with questions posed and left open for interpretation and further thought.  There are beautiful, physical poems, often seemingly addressed to a lover.  One senses a great depth to this collection that warrants dipping into again and again.  New depths and  treasures are sure to be discovered each time. 

Non Fiction

Mirror of Intimacy Tom Bliss and Alexandra Katehakis
You’ll think at first that this is a coyly-titled self-help sex guide but it’s richer, deeper and very much broader than that. It’s a day by day exploration of our sexual and sensual well being with thoughtful advice. Not every day’s text will resonate with everybody but it’s meant to be a slow burn, a seduction into feeling better about yourself. The book encompasses all relationship issues with sensitivity. Clearly, the message is that if you work on the overall relationship, then the quality of sex will become more satisfying and enjoyable for both partners. 

The Troll Cookbook Karima Cammell and Clint Marsh
A beautiful book, bursting with information about trolls, humans, fire, seasonal ingredients and recipes.  It even contains information on how to make your own spoon out of wood.  The delightful pictures (depicting rather more trolls than food) entice the reader to linger and add richness to an already sumptuous feast.  It’s a pleasure to handle and offers a new, original approach to both books and cookery. 

Vermont - an Outsider's Inside View Edward L Rubin
The impressive photographs in this coffee-table book of generous proportions lay out for us a slice of life in the state of Vermont, USA.  Among the wide, open landscapes there are more intimate observations: power boxes; balconies on a fading building; a railway line across a bridge; the minutiae of everyday existence. But, essentially, it is about the people of Vermont, providing a glimpse of the ordinary and the extraordinary, a portrait of people, life in all shapes and sizes.
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How to Make a Rainbow Rose Maree Teychenné​
This is a cleverly constructed book for teaching children how to spell those difficult words that so easily confuse.  It’s  creative colouring, offering fun pictures that draw you in and invite you to create your own palette.  The approach is unusual, and the practical idea of colouring the individual letters as well as the pictures reinforces the spelling and helps to train the memory.  It is carefully laid out and very clear. It will be useful for children whose reading and writing are at a developing stage and dyslexic children, but also those adults who still need a few reminders about tricky spellings that never  sit entirely comfortably in our minds.
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Sea Journal Lisa Woollett
A beautifully produced book of photographs of the coast, with detailed close-ups that confound and amaze. Every time you examine the images, you feel you’re having your eyes gently opened by an artist who is guiding you to see familiar objects in a new way.  There’s a hidden world along our shores that you can so easily take for granted, and extraordinary natural patterns.  This book draws our attention to the beauty of those patterns.  There is, however, more to this book than photography. With pleasing clarity, the text explores the images and makes sense of them with local knowledge and expertise. The book progresses logically through each month of the year in a well thought out format.  The resulting exploration of our glorious coast line is deeply satisfying.
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Fiction and Short Fiction

​Miracles and Conundrums of the Secondary Planets Jacob M Appel
There is a linking theme across these short stories but more important is how they all share the same verve. This is writing that’s alive and immediately engaging, with vivid characters you believe in even as you like some and dislike others.
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When Planets Slip their Tracks Joanna Campbell
These short stories, several of which end with a smart twist, are superbly written and populated with strong characters and fine, small details. She creates real people – she is especially good with US teenagers, as in the title story where the protagonist, who has learning difficulties, is pregnant and abandoned – and demonstrates genuine compassion for ordinary people, those whose great skill when confronted with a hostile world is to pretend that all is well.

York Ferry Annie Dawid
This is an ambitious novel, told with irresistibly smooth prose, that traces a family over twenty years, seeing inside the head of each one with extraordinary insight.  The father leaves while the children are young, and his presence hovers over them as they mature, his absence inevitably influencing the development of their personalities.  It  almost reads like a succession of short stories about the world as it used to be and as it is now.   The book is unexpectedly gripping, authentic, immediate – it is reminiscent of Anne Tyler – a world where the action is secondary to the truth of beautifully observed lives.  It has to be read slowly to appreciate its true worth.
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The Secret Mother Victoria Delderfield
When a Chinese mother dies in an unexpected accident in England, the family whose adopted twin daughters she was tutoring discover she was their birth mother.  They decide to travel to China to find out more.  The details of her early life in China and her reasons for abandoning her children feel authentic and shed an uncomfortable light on the suffering that paved the way for the Chinese economic miracle.  The themes are topical, the details give a rare insight into unfamiliar history, and the author portrays her characters with sensitivity and tenderness. 

Six Pounds Eight Ounces Rhian Elizabeth
A wonderful voice straight from the Welsh valleys threads through this novel of friendship and alienation.  We follow Hannah from the age of six to her troubled teenage years, through school fights, family breakdown and loss.  It’s easy to sympathise with the characters as they slip into destructive relationships, like those with the magnetic Marley and Billy, but there‘s plenty of good humour, too.  The characters are lively and  believable and the vulnerability of teenage relationships is beautifully conveyed.  ‘My right side is cold without her walking next to it,’  Hannah says about her lost friend.          
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Mr Shakespear's Whore Lizzie Jones
This is the story of Aemilia Bassano a court musician’s daughter who, in the 1580s, moved in courtly and theatrical circles and eventually found her way into Shakespeare’s life.  The depth of research and knowledge of the period is remarkable and convincing.  Not only is the theatre of the time vividly brought to life in all its glory, but real people and events of national importance like the Armada and the uprising against Queen Elizabeth I, are skilfully woven in, too.  The relationship between Aemilia and her husband Alfonso starts out as a financial one, but ends up touchingly close to real love.  

The Strength of Bone Lucie Wilk
When a Canadian doctor goes to practice in Malawi, he finds it hard to cope with the poverty, the lack of drugs and medical equipment, the inevitability of death from diseases that should be easily beaten, as they are in Canada.  The personal problems that he was hoping to forget become more urgent in the uncertainty and fragility of the African world.  He befriends a Malawian nurse, who  is faced with the conflict of childhood superstitions and the practical nature of her profession. The well-rounded characters are portrayed with sympathy, their dialogue convincing, and the technical details are detailed and authentic. 

Children's and YA

My Mummy is a Plumber Kerrine Bryan & Jason Bryan, illustrated by Marissa Peguinho
A book for young children which is clearly intended to challenge the gender gap in the plumbing world.  The illustrations are excellent, revealing the structure of buildings and following the pipes through the walls.  There is plenty of fun with water – loos flooding, baths overflowing and pipes freezing in the loft, while Mummy rides to the rescue on a regular basis and saves the day. 

Oy Yew Ana Salote
We are catapulted into an alien world of waifs, who we quickly care about, of people with power, where we find injustice, loyalty and friendship in equal measure.  The reader is never patronised – we are expected to accepted this world without explanation, and we do, immediately.  This is the first of a trilogy, and there are many promising themes – a fascination with bones, the rafts that bring the waifs to the shore, the puzzling origins of Oy Yew himself –  which offer potential for the future novels, but this all heightens the tension and leads to a breath-taking climax.  Our reader was so impressed she intends to recommend the entire trilogy for her school library.  

Forest of Lies Chris Speyer
This is a well written and skilfully constructed book about the near future, where London has flooded – the Thames barrier has failed -  and sixteen-year-old Mark is exiled to a farm in Devon, where he discovers that the forests that have been planted across Britain conceal an unsavoury secret. It’s a good, fast paced, exciting adventure, but also covers issues of diversity, climate change, immigration, the threat of terrorism and arrogant politicians.
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Edison Blue J I Thacker
We are 2600 years in the future, and Earth is under attack from an invading Entity.  Edison, who emerges from a protective egg from the past and discovers he is completely blue, becomes the unlikely hero who cheerfully applies common sense to each obstacle in front of him.  He is accompanied by an OMNI, a useful, friendly device full of information and good advice, and together they proceed to save the world.  This is well-written, funny (some well-chosen references to earlier fantasy novels) and is as entertaining to the adult reader as it would be to its younger target audience.

Echoes Laura Tisdall
A startlingly original book set in the world of computers, portraying socially awkward Mallory, who has a phobia of being touched that limits her ability to negotiate the world.  She only feels comfortable with a computer keyboard in front of her, so strongest connections are with a secret organisation of apparently benign hackers.  It is a rip-roaring, fast moving story, cleverly constructed and extremely exciting.  The members of Mallory’s family, who have their own share of difficulties, are portrayed with sympathy and compassion.