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The 2013 Winners are In!



Daunt Books Children's Short Story Competition 2013

Northern Europe

• Scandinavia
• Great Britain
• Ireland

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  The Sense of an Ending by Julian Barnes

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  A crisp, cool narrative with twists that administer swift kicks to the head, Barnes’ elegant novella depicts the appalling consequences of briefly wished-for revenge. Wonderfully unsettling.

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  Arthur and George by Julian Barnes

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  The intriguing story of how Sir Arthur Conan Doyle donned the mantle of his famous detective to exonerate George Edalji. Edalji, the son of an Indian vicar living in rural Staffordshire, was sent to prison for seven years, wrongly accused of brutally mutilating local animals. Part double biography, part detective story and part exploration of Victorian racism.

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  Secret Scripture by Sebastian Barry

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  Based in a Victorian mental asylum, the chapters of this rich, alluring novel alternate between a doctor trying to uncover the secrets of his oldest inmate Roseanne and Roseanne’s own troubled memories. It is about truth, what you chose to remember and what you don’t, a history of Ireland over the past century and about a woman’s devastated life.

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  First Love and Other Novellas by Samuel Beckett

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  A collection of 4 of Samuel Beckett's novellas, cruelly witty and desperately hopeless, they are a great introduction to his prose. The cover has a wonderful black and white photograph of Beckett's iconic, carved face taken by John Minihan.

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  Wish Her Safe at Home by Stephen Benatar

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  A quiet, brilliant book that somehow slipped into oblivion after it's nomination for the Booker Prize in 1982. Much to our delight it has been republished by NYRB and tells the sometimes funny, often tragic story of Rebecca Waring and how she embarks on a life of glorious luxury, creativity and decadence only to descend into something that seems suspiciously like madness.

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  The Uncommon Reader by Alan Bennett

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  One night, while out walking the royal corgis, the Queen stumbles upon a mobile library and soon becomes an obsessive reader. A little gem of a story and a highly amusing satire.

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  Smut by Alan Bennett

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  Alan Bennett’s delightfully ‘unseemly stories’ concern the racy exploits of two women in middle life. One, the recently widowed Mrs Donaldson, takes on a rather unusual job and meets an unlikely suitor. The other, Mrs Forbes, is a matriarch with a vehement dislike for her son’s fiancé and a secret under wraps. Both tales are rich with the observational humour that fans of Bennett adore.

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  Lorna Doone by Richard Blackmore

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  Set in Devon in the 17th century, Richard Blackmore's famous love story is rich with drama, heroes, villains and romance. Beyond that, Blackmore's attention to detail and language make it an interesting portrayal of the people and the area and the critical essay in this edition argues it is a barely concealed defence of Victorian values.

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  The Last September by Elizabeth Bowen

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  Set in 1920s Ireland with the Troubles brewing like a dark cloud on the horizon, the Anglo-Irish Naylor family continue as normal, with tea on the lawn and tennis parties. A witty, sharply-observed period piece which brilliantly captures the last days of British rule in Ireland.

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  Waiting for Sunrise by William Boyd

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  A beautifully observed portrait of wartime Europe and a feverish and mesmerising journey into the human psyche, from English fiction's master storyteller. In Vienna, 1913, a troubled English actor begins a passionate love affair with an intense, distressed woman he meets in a psychiatrist’s waiting room. But war is imminent, and events in Vienna have caught up with the couple in the most damaging way. Unable to live an ordinary life, Lysander Rief is plunged into the dangerous theatre of wartime intelligence - a world of sex, scandal and spies, where lines of truth and deception blur with every waking day.

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  The New Confessions by William Boyd

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  The fictional biography of John James Todd, a man who should have been great but wasn't. From his childhood in Edinburgh, to the Western Front, to the Berlin film world and then Hollywood, William Boyd gives us a journey through the history of the 20th century guided by our funny, awkward, frustrated and flawed hero. Highly recommended to a male reader looking for entertaining, clever and plot driven fiction.

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  Jane Eyre by Charlotte Bronte

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  Charlotte Bronte threw aside everything that was expected of a romantic heroine, Jane Eyre is bad-tempered, unattractive and poor, and yet she succeeds in being one of the most powerful and loved characters in all of English fiction. A truly remarkable story which can be read again and again and will always reveal new depths.

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  Wuthering Heights by Emily Bronte

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  Forever inscribing the Yorkshire moors into the canon of English Literature, Emily Bronte brings to life her beloved landscape in this story of love, revenge and tragedy.

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  The Lost Diaries by Craig Brown

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  Brown, a long-standing writer for Private Eye, has created the ideal bedside book - a calendar of imaginary diary entries from the great and the good. From V. S. Naipaul to Jeremy Clarkson, from Sylvia Plath to Barbara Cartland, the entries are funny, insightful and endlessly entertaining.

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  Greenvoe by George Mackay Brown

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  A week in the life of a small, fictional, Orkney community coming to terms with a potential military project which may threaten their way of life. A wonderful book which glorifies Orkney culture, weaving into the plot elements of folklore, custom, myth and legend.

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  Ragnarok: The End of the Gods by A.S. Byatt

  Price: £14.99    Add to Basket

  Evacuated to the British countryside during World War Two, a lonely and confused young girl loses herself in a collection of ancient Norse legends that depict monstrous scenes of destruction and renewal. An unusual and exciting blend of apocalyptic grandeur, allegory and youthful idealism.

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  The Children's Book by A. S. Byatt

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  Shortlisted for the Booker prize, this imbeccably recreated picture of late Victorian and early 20th century England explores the notion of responsiblity and creativity amidst echoes of children's literature defined in that period by the voices of Kenneth Grahame and J. M. Barrie and the illustrations of Arthur Rackham.

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  Jack Maggs by Peter Carey

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  A beautifully realised homage to Charles Dickens' 'Great Expectations'. Follows the fortunes of Jack Maggs who, deported to Australia for being a thief, makes his fortune there and returns to London 20 years later.

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  The Chemistry of Tears by Peter Carey

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  A dazzlingly original work of fiction, woven into the fabric of historical truth. When museum conservator Catherine Gehrig learns of the death of her married lover and colleague, she is faced with the prospect of grieving in secret, until her boss gives her a special project to occupy her mind. She must piece together the history and mechanics of an eerie mechanical duck, commissioned in nineteenth-century Germany to enliven the spirits of a dangerously ill boy. As Catherine rummages through notebooks in search of clues, she begins to understand the chemistry of love and the cost of deranged genius.

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  A Month in the Country by J. L. Carr

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  A short, gentle and quintessentially English novel that describes a summer in 1920 when two war veterans meet in a small Yorkshire village. Together these two men slowly try to recover their old way of life and their belief in humanity after it they have been virtually destroyed by the First World War.

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  Other People's Money by Justin Cartwright

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  Elderly patriarch Sir Harry Trevelyan-Tubal is having trouble accepting that his banking empire, obscene wealth and precarious relationship with his younger wife are in jeopardy, and charges his reluctant son with the responsibility of saving all three. Cartwright has bucked the trend for frenetic financial thrillers about sociopaths and egoists by weaving a gentle satire in which his characters - flawed, misguided though they might be - are unmistakeably human.

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  The Pleasant Light of Day by Philip O Ceallaigh

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  One of the most exciting collections of short stories written in the last few years and a brilliant new voice in Irish fiction. O Ceallaigh's stories are set around the world from Cairo to Brazil and he includes an amusing satire on the work of a popular contemporary author.

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  On the Black Hill by Bruce Chatwin

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  One of our favourite novels and an ode to the Welsh countryside, it is the simple story of twin brothers growing up together on an isolated farm dealing with the frustrations and minutiae of everyday rural life.

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  The Half Brother by Lars Saabye Christensen

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  A marvellous novel of fraternal relations set in Oslo. Barnum lives with an eccentic family and his mute half-brother Fred, conceived under tragic circumstances. The pair pursue divergent lives as a screenwriter and boxer, but years later are forced by their dying mother to attempt a reconciliation. Ambitious, panoramic, surreal and moving.

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  The Rotter's Club by Jonathan Coe

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  Set against the bleak, urban backdrop of Birmingham in the 1970s, a group of teenagers take over their school magazine. With the comedy and poignancy of all coming-of-age novels, we follow their everyday delights and concerns, but also their response to the strikes, racial tension and political change going on around them.