Helen Macdonald wins Costa Book of the Year 2014
With the Costa Book Award category winners already out, the overall winner of Book of the Year 2014 was given to Helen Macdonald.
The Costa Book Awards 2014 Highlights
Costa Book of the Year, 2014 and Costa Biography Award Winner, 2014
H for Hawk, Helen Macdonald
Helen Macdonald's memoir is the first biography to win Book of the Year since 2005, with Hilary Spuring's study of Matisse. Having alread scooped the 2014 Samuel Johnson prize H is For Hawk is a rare, rare thing. It is about death: Macdonald’s father dies of a heart attack without warning. The grieving daughter retreats into her childhood obsssion, falconry, and begins to train a goshawk called Mabel. This is where the book is about life, too: Macdonald’s novel is quickened with the elemental, ancient wildness of these birds of prey. Mabel’s savageness fills the house “as a bowl of lilies fills a house with scent’ and Macdonald begins the long process of training her. Astonishingly well-written, this book provides a fascinating insight into the arcane world of falconry. But more than this, we learn about human nature, the process of grief, and some primitive wildness that we still crave.
Costa Novel Award Winner 2014
How to be Both, Ali Smith
The latest Booke
r-nominated novel by the ever-ingenious Ali Smith was odds-on favourite to scoop the Best Book Award, but lost out to Helen Macdonald's H for Hawk. How to be Both is a shining example of structural innovation with a witty riff on the dualistic title built into the prose as two stories illuminate one other. And the inventive force of this novel went beyond the written word: the split structure was also reflected with two simultaneous editions of the novel, showcasing the parallel structures and leaving the order with which each reader experiences the stories up to chance.
Costa First Novel Award Winner 2014
Elizabeth is Missing, Emma Healey
Costa Poetry Award Winner, 2014
My Family and Other Superheroes, Jonathan Edwards
Costa Children's Book Award Winner 2014
Five Children on the Western Front, Kate Saunders - ages 8+
Children's books are statistically the least likely to win the top spot, and the last kids' author to bag the prize was Philip Pullman in 2001 for The Amber Spyglass. Budding bookworms and nostalgic grown ups have been charmed by this touching sequel to E. Nesbit's classic Five Children and It. In the centenary of the first world war, Kate Saunders continues the Edwardian tale to the outbreak of fighting and revisits the characters in the context of the trenches. Fans of Nesbit's original were dubious, but capturing the loss of innocence and sacrifices of war so vividly, this sequel stands alone as a stunning children's book while also reviving affections for the story of Psammead, the trouble-making sand fairy with the power to grant wishes. And if you missed out on last year's 'best book', the Costa Book of the Year 2013 winner was Nathan Filer's the searingly sharp The Shock of the Fall.
The Shock of the Fall, Nathan Filer
Nathan Filer's debut novel delivers the titular fall on the very first page: as a child Matthew killed his brother and the rest of the story is built upon the subtle yet searing shock of this trauma as it shapes his life thereafter. Alongside his creative writing course, Filer worked in a psychiatric unit and the intimate insight into this little understood world resounds. As the schizophrenic narrator remarks: 'mental illness turns people inwards' and, while it creates a touching portrait of fragile family relationships and enough intrigue to keep you up reading until the end, it is the tenderness and honesty with which the narrative exposes this insularity that makes The Shock of the Fall so captivating.
