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The 2013 Winners are In!



Daunt Books Children's Short Story Competition 2013

North America

• USA
• Canada

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  American Tabloid by James Ellroy

  Price: £7.99    Add to Basket

  Set in the run-up to the assassination of John F. Kennedy, James Ellroy's compelling and punchy first novel in the Underworld USA trilogy essentially rewrites the commonly-held assumptions about Kennedy and his death.

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  The Black Dahlia by James Ellroy

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  The first in James Ellroy's L.A. Quartet, this is a crime novel set in the nasty world of 1940s Los Angeles. Based on the real-life murder of small town beauty queen Elizabeth Short, this novel is dark, brooding and utterly gripping.

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  What We Talk About When We Talk About Anne Frank by Nathan Englander

  Price: £12.99    Add to Basket

  A glorious, intricate collection of stories about modern Jewishness. Englander has an unerring ear for dialogue and a wonderfully animated sense of humour.

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  The Marriage Plot by Jeffrey Eugenides

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  An English major writing her thesis on the nineteenth century "marriage plot" is confronted with the real-life motivations of the human heart when she finds herself at the centre of a love triangle. A witty and penetrating modern love story.

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  Middlesex by Jeffrey Eugenides

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  A child arrives in the mid-west escaping the Turkish nationalist's destruction of Izmir. This tremendous novel traces life in booming Detroit and the consequences of its subsequent demise.

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  Ask the Dust by John Fante

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  A young Italian American author begins to unravel as his desperately high hopes for success on the gleaming streets of L.A. come to nothing. A passionate novel full of yearning and frustration.

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  The Sound and the Fury by William Faulkner

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  One of the most celebrated novels of the 20th century, it describes the collapse of a dysfunctional, Southern family written in four distinct parts. If you can stick with its complexity and Faulkner's stream of consciousness, this is a liberating modernist masterpiece in the same league as James Joyce and Virginia Woolf.

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  On Green Dolphin Street by Sebastian Faulks

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  Traumatised by the war and caught up in the intense atmosphere of Cold War Washington the lives of a British embassy employee, his wife and a reporter become intertwined. Not up to the standard of Birdsong with relatively unbelievable characters and plot but, as with all Sebastian Faulks' books, his expert use of language and vivid description paints a genuine picture of a time and a place.

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  Then We Came to the End by Joshua Ferris

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  A satire set in a Chicago advertising agency which describes an all too familiar corporate environment from the theft of office chairs to the loneliness of the lobby porter. With dry wit and occasional tragedy Joshua Ferris explores the death of the American dream.

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  The Great Gatsby by F Scott Fitzgerald

  Price: £50.00    Add to Basket

  Glittering decadence and doomed glamour of 1920s New York, an absolute classic filled with suspense, loneliness and passion. This gloriously tactile, leather-bound edition from Penguin makes a marvellous present for the Scott-Fitzgerald fan or a young man off to university.

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  The Great Gatsby by F. Scott Fitzgerald

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  Glittering decadence and doomed glamour of 1920s New York, an absolute classic filled with suspense, loneliness and passion. Highly recommended if you haven't read it by now.

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  Rock Springs by Richard Ford

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  A wonderful collection of short stories, both poignant and amusing, about lonely, dysfunctional characters in small town Montana.

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  Freedom by Jonathan Franzen

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  Heralded as the book of the century, written by a modern-day Tolstoy, Franzen's much hyped novel is irresistible. Although at times it strikes one as slightly overwritten, it is an enormously ambitious, emotionally complex family saga that perfectly evokes America of the 1990s with some exquisite scene setting. Bravo Franzen for bringing the literary novel back into the limelight at the very least.

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  The Way West by A. B. Guthrie

  Price: £11.99    Add to Basket

  Winner of the Pulitzer Prize, this classic tale set in the Wild West tells the story of Dick Summers as he guides a wagon train from Oregon to Missouri in 1846. With engaging vigour and obvious passion, Guthrie describes the trials and the triumphs of these settlers and the harsh beauty of the wilderness.

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  Tinkers by Paul Harding

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  A poetic and lyrical masterpiece which takes you on a journey through the thoughts of a dying mender of clocks and into the mind of his long lost father, a tinker and an epileptic. Magical, hallucinatory writing which won the 2010 Pulitzer Prize for Fiction.

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  The Lazarus Project by Aleksander Hemon

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  In 1908 a nineteen-year old Russian man named Lazarus tried to deliver a letter to the Chicago Chief of Police and was gunned down on the doorstep as a suspected assassin. In contemporary Chicago, a Bosnian writer becomes obsessed with finding out what happened. A fantastic novel from this young Bosnian-Herzegovinian narrated in superbly ravishing prose.

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  Nature Girl by Carl Hiaasen

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  An extraordinary novel set in the Everglades and populated by a cast of hopeless men and eccentric, stubborn women; funny and sharp.

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  The Summer Without Men by Siri Hustvedt

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  After thirty years of marriage, Mia Fredrickson's husband - a neuroscientist and 'rat-man' - exits stage-left with a vivacious Frenchwoman. In response, Mia escapes to the prairies where she grew up and spends her days reading, writing and railing against her past in the company of four octogenarian widows. Hustvedt's new novel lacks the immediacy of What I Loved, but weaves philosophy, art and psychoanalytic theory into an intelligent, mordantly comic whole.

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  What I Loved by Siri Hustvedt

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  Two artistic families become friends in bohemian Greenwich Village. Growing up together, tragedy strikes and unwittingly their lives become embroiled in a decadent New York City underworld. This brilliant, disturbing and heart-breaking book is also the thinly-veiled story of the author's step-son Daniel Auster.

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  In One Person by John Irving

  Price: £18.99    Add to Basket

  An impassioned, bittersweet tale of desire and sexual identity, from the author of modern classic A Prayer for Owen Meany. Billy, the bisexual narrator, recounts the story of his life as a 'sexual suspect', and celebrates the unconventional friends and lovers who have peopled his life.

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  A Prayer for Owen Meany by John Irving

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  This is the extraordinary story of Owen Meany, a dwarfed boy with a high-pitched voice who kills his best friend's mother by mistake and believes himself to be destined to martyrdom. Humorous yet deeply moving, this is a story about faith and the love of two friends for each other.

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  The New York Stories of Henry James by Henry James

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  A beautifully-presented collection of Henry James's nine New York stories, including the novella Washington Square, introduced by Colm Toibin. By bringing these stories together, we get a real sense of James watching from a distance and trying to make sense of the city.

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  Bostonians by Henry James

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  A satiric novel concerning Boston politics and society in the 1870s and featuring a lawyer, his feminist cousin and their rivalry for the affections of the pretty, young Verena. You either adore James for his evocative description, his depiction of power games within relationships and his modernist characteristic of playing with perception, or his labyrinthine semi-clauses will drive you mad, either way this is a remarkable snapshot of late 19th century Boston.

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  White Sky, Black Ice by Stan Jones

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  An excellent murder mystery set in Alaska, where State Trooper Nathan Active is sent to investigate two suicides in a small Inupiat village.

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  The Immigrant by Manju Kapur

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  A sensitive and thoughtful novel which follows Ananda and Nina as they both leave India for Canada, their experience of settling into their new homeland and their testing marriage. Similar in subject and style to Jumpha Lahiri's Unaccustomed Earth.