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The 2013 Winners are In!



Daunt Books Children's Short Story Competition 2013

Western Europe

• France
• Benelux
• Germany
• Austria
• Switzerland

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  Cousin Bette by Honore de Balzac

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  A marvellously vivid and dark portrait of the grasping bourgeois society of 1840s Paris, in which poor plain Bette is driven to a sinister programme of revenge by the all-consuming jealousy she harbours for her wealthy, frivolous relatives.

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  The Elegance of the Hedgehog by Muriel Barby

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  Phenomenally successful in its native country, Barby's quiet, gently philosophical novel about a Parisian apartment block and it's shadowy, yet secretly passionate concierge is the perfect book club choice.

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  Nightwood by Djuna Barnes

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  Barnes's slender and extraordinary novel documents ex-pat lives in the Paris of the Roaring Twenties. In luminous, evocative prose she executes a stylistic experiment worthy of Virginia Woolf, one that has divided readers for over 70 years. Those who rise to her challenge will be richly rewarded.

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  A Long Long Way by Sebastian Barry

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  In the utterly believable and at times achingly moving voice of Willie Dunne, an 18 year old Dubliner sent to the Trenches in 1914, Sebastian Barry describes the true horror of the trenches and the dilemmas of an Irish boy as he weighs his allegiance to British victory with his personal attachment to Irish Republicanism. An outstanding, emotional and important book, we couldn't recommend it more highly.

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  Fair Stood the Wind for France by H. E. Bates

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  A sensory, evocative novel set in occupied France which describes the powerful love story between an injured airman and a French girl.

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  A Legacy by Sybille Bedford

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  With delightful wit and razorsharp observation, Bedford depicts the marriage of Julius von Felden and Melanie Merz, a union on which the fortune of their two very different Prussian families depends. The menacing backdrop of pre-WW1 Germany works in compelling harmony with the tale of personal upheaval.

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  A Favourite of the Gods by Sybille Bedford

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  Following the success of the first Daunt Books publication, Saki's Improper Stories, we are delighted to publish this remarkable novel by the Booker-shortlisted author, Sybille Bedford. Set in Rome, London and the French Riviera in the 1920s, A Favourite of the Gods tells the story of three generations of women and the dramatic upheavals of the early twentieth century. The story begins with a beautiful New England heiress, a Roman prince and the confused catastrophe of their marriage. Their daughter, Constanza, has an idyllic childhood spent in crumbling Roman palaces, sun-baked olive groves and at sumptuous parties, until her life is changed forever by a clash of culture and an impulsive decision. You can now buy the second novel in the sequence, A Compass Error, exclusively at Daunt Books.

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  Pig Earth by John Berger

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  In exquisitely constructed stories dense with the stuff of everyday life, Berger offers a masterly and elegiac portrait of a declining Alpine peasant culture. Lyrical and haunting.

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  The Loser by Thomas Bernhard

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  A remarkable meditation on success and failure, Bernhard's acclaimed 1983 novel centres on a fictional relationship between piano virtuoso Glenn Gould and two fellow students driven to despair by his talent. Wonderful.

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  Murder in the Marais by Cara Black

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  The first of Black's utterly brilliant Aimee Leduc mysteries, in which our heroine - a French-American detective - is approached by a rabbi and lead to a corpse marked with a swastika. Stylish, gripping and drenched in Parisian atmosphere.

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  Q by Luther Blissett

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  Set during the 16th century religious wars in Europe this is a bold and complex novel of political intrigues, betrayal and espionage. With highly accurate attention to historical detail, vivid language and a thrilling plot this is an unusual but hugely enjoyable tale.

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  Lost Honour of Katharina Blum by Heinrich Boll

  £7.99 Price: £7.19    Add to Basket

  Katharina Blum, an unremarkable young woman spends a night with a terror suspect and her life is systematically destroyed by the German gutter press amidst the atmosphere of terrorist hysteria. Boll's gripping prose maintains a cool detachment although his moral anger is apparent throughout.

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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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  Villette by Charlotte Bronte

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  Drawing extensively on her own experiences as a teacher in Brussels, Bronte created this powerfully moving study of an isolated English woman haunted by unrequited love. Lucy Snowe is an exquisitely drawn heroine with a fierce spirit, and the small-town atmosphere of Villette is deftly evoked.

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  Hotel du Lac by Anita Brookner

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  Banished by her embarrassed friends to Geneva, Edith Hope must contemplate her past and her future amidst the rarefied atmosphere and varied guests of the Hotel Du Lac. Brookner's touching and witty novel won the Booker in 1984 and still stands as a great read.

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  The Fall by Albert Camus

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  Trademark existential perfection from Camus. Over the course of a few drunken Amsterdam nights, Jean-Baptiste Clamence regales a chance acquaintance (and us) with the story of his spectacular fall from grace.

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  Auto da Fe by Elias Canetti

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  Peter Kien is a distinguished yet reclusive Sinologist living in Germany between the wars. Expelled from his home he roams the dark streets, guided by a sinister chess-playing dwarf. Published on the eve of WWII by a Jewish writer with a sense of impending doom, this is a dark but fantastically lucid novel, worthy of the effort it demands.

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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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  Parrot and Olivier in America by Peter Carey

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  Dickensian in scope and populated with a cast of eccentric, roguish individuals, Carey’s third Booker-nominated novel is a comic masterpiece. When his eponymous heroes – a conceited French aristocrat and a jaded, unkempt servant – are thrown together on a journey to the New World, they gain an insight into life at the opposite end of the human spectrum, and an unlikely friendship is born. This is both a tender portrait of two men and a dazzling reimagining of the birth of democracy.

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  Our Kind of Traitor by John le Carre

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  Back on form, le Carre's latest offering is an enjoyable thriller packed full of Russian criminals and corrupt English politicians.

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  Girl With a Pearl Earring by Tracy Chevalier

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  Chevalier's brilliant fictional account of the relationship between Vermeer and his most famous subject is at once atmospheric and urgent.

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  By A Slow River by Philippe Claudel

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  A mesmerizing tale of man haunted by three mysterious deaths that shattered the placid life of a small village. A bestseller in France and winner of the Prix Renaudot, this is a grave and potent novel soaked in melancholy, lit with flashes of humanity.

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  Brodeck's Report by Philippe Claudel

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  Published to wide critical acclaim, Philipe Claudel's harrowing story brings to life a small village community in France, reeling from occupation and the horrors of the Second World War. Every single one of us has been utterly blown away by this book.

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  Monsieur Linh and His Child by Philippe Claudel

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  Ecstatically reviewed, this wistful and supremely moving novel matches the perfect simplicity of Claudel's award-winning Brodeck's Report. Traumatised by memories of his war-ravaged country, Monsieur Linh travels to a foreign land to bring the child in his arms to safety. Walking the streets of this strange new town, Linh encounters a widower whose dignified sorrow mirrors his own, and an instinctive friendship is born.

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  The Interrogation by J.M.G. Le Clezio

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  Since emerging from the shadows to win the Nobel Prize for Literature in 2008, Le Clezio has been winning over a raft of new readers. Nowhere is his astonishing, unsettling power more prevalent than in 'The Interrogation', a thrillingly surreal tale of an amnesiac holed-up in an empty seaside villa who finally comes out of exile to address the local townsfolk, only to be whisked away to an asylum.