Mike McCormack wins €100,000 International Dublin literary award with one-sentence novel
“It’s not often that an author described on his own Wikipedia page as ‘disgracefully neglected’ is awarded a €100,000 literary prize. But this is where the Irish author Mike McCormack finds himself, with Wednesday’s announcement that he has won the International Dublin literary award for his novel, Solar Bones. As someone who has hovered close to mainstream success without ever shaking off the slightly damning label of ‘writer’s writer’, he is unsurprisingly delighted.”
Sian Cain
Guardian
Here’s Oriol Miró hand-foiling a single letter of his cover type for the remarkable debut novel He Is Mine and I Have No Other by Rebecca O’Connor, out now.
“A Note on Wanting”: enjoy this early preview of Matt Haig’s Notes on a Nervous Planet, the follow-up to number one bestseller Reasons to Stay Alive. From the audiobook, read by the author.
‘An immense and moving jazz riff… The acutely immersive world of American Histories is irresistible, and these profoundly moving stories will haunt you long after you’ve finished reading.’
Colin Grant
The Guardian
Watch Robert Webb read from his bestselling memoir How Not to be a Boy at the Hay Festival: ‘I thought only wimps needed manners, and only tough guys were brave.’
Robert Webb
The Hay Festival
“Wideman is a writer who excels at dramatising African American sensibilities and this collection typically addresses issues of race, injustice and inequality with power and potency. Crystallised moments of experience carry entire worlds in stories … from the whimsical to the political. This is published alongside Wideman’s earlier novels and is a gem for anyone yet to discover his work.”
Observer
“Laidlaw brought Glasgow to life more viscerally than any book I had read before: the good and the bad, the language and the humour, the violence and the drinking … This book made me realise that pacey, streetwise thrillers didn’t have to be American: we had mean streets enough of our own.”
The Guardian asked great crime writers to pick their favourite crime novels, and Christopher Brookmyre thinks you should be reading William McIlvanney’s Laidlaw.
“An excellent new book is imminent: Fully Coherent Plan for a New and Better Society features 254 new illustrations, all drawn in his distinctive thick black pen on stark white paper, the naivety of the image offset by the scabrous, surreal or darkly comic text.”
David Shrigley interviewed in the Observer.
Observer
Robert Webb on gender conditioning (or, the way you’re told how to behave because of what’s in your pants) – from the number one bestseller How Not To Be a Boy.
Pre-order David Shrigley’s FULLY COHERENT PLAN
and you could win a fine statuette of his Fourth Plinth commission, to remind you forever that things are Really Good.
