The 2024 Shortlist

The 2024 Shortlist is:

The judges said:

‘The Walter Scott Prize judging criteria – originality, innovation, ambition, durability and of course quality of writing – are beautifully showcased in our 2024 shortlist. In addition, we have six novels as diverse in their subject-matter as in style of writing: an attempted sexual revolution in nineteenth century London; dangerously entwined lives in 1940s Trinidad; gripping tensions in Nazi-occupied Rome; a gentle 1960s home-counties heartbreaker; stories within stories from the terminus of the Underground Railroad; and love, betrayal and scandal in the Straits Settlements of Penang. At the heart of each novel lies a deep understanding of humanity in all its quirky strengths and weaknesses, with each of the WSP 2024 shortlisted authors having something new to say and a new way of saying it.’

MORE ABOUT THE SHORTLISTED BOOKS – JUDGES’ COMMENTS

THE NEW LIFE by Tom Crewe (Chatto & Windus)

‘The New Life is a remarkable first novel, demonstrating Tom Crewe’s formidable ability to render the sights,  sounds and smells of a period – the 1890s – with dash and assurance. His story of gay sexual awakening, based on historical events, is bold and unconfined, threading the first stirrings of social awareness with the shame, and danger, that gripped the lives of his central characters as they slipped in and out of the shadows, and confronted rigid social conventions, and the law.  His exploration of the erotic thrills of discovery and the acceptance of sexual ambiguity makes this a novel of our age too, set beautifully in the past but written in a clear and passionate voice that speaks to a different future.’

HUNGRY GHOSTS by Kevin Jared Hosein (Bloomsbury)

‘1940s Trinidad, a blood oath, an absence. In Hungry Ghosts we are drawn into a world of deep and thorny relationships not just between classes – Kevin Jared Hosein is too subtle a writer for that – but between individuals, their complex histories and the lure of a better, or at least different, future.  Like an artist on canvas, the author pаints a whole emotional world for the reader, his characters as full and rounded as the natural world he conjures in ‘all shades of green soaked with vermilion and red and purple and ochre’. Hungry Ghosts is a sensational book in the literal sense of that word: you can see, smell, hear, taste and almost touch Trinidad, and if the story is harrowing and full of shadows, there is rare beauty in its telling.’

MY FATHER’S HOUSE by Joseph O’Connor (Harvill Secker)

‘Joseph O’Connor’s My Father’s House has many of the elements of a Walter Scott classic – not least its wonderfully drawn cast in this thrilling tale of wartime Rome based on a real characters and events. Monseignor Hugh O’Flaherty and the Gestapo commander Paul Hauptmann pit their wits against each other as O’Flaherty and his co-conspirators use every subterfuge they can to help Jews and Allied prisoners escape from under the noses of German Occupying Forces. It is beautifully constructed, with Rome, and in particular the Vatican City vividly rendered,  and proves that WW2, in the hands of a novelist as fine as Joseph O’Connor, still has many important stories to tell.’

IN THE UPPER COUNTRY by Kai Thomas (Viking Canada/John Murray)

‘The story of European settlers, battling the elements in their sod cabins on the Canadian prairies, has been told many times, but Kai Thomas takes us into a very different world – that of the Black people who fled from slavery in the United States and made the perilous journey north along the ‘Underground Railway’ across the border into Ontario, where they established their own free town. Intensive research underpins this finely written novel, but it never obtrudes. The reader is gripped by the characters of the two powerful women at its heart. The secret links that bind them are revealed gradually through a sequence of extraordinary stories, which explore the rarely told history of how closely the Black, Native and Métis communities of Canada were and are connected. With a cast of vibrant characters and magnificent descriptions of the landscape of Ontario, The Upper Country will enhance the reader’s understanding of how, in the aftermath of the ghastly experience of slavery, Black people began to repair their lives with courage and dignity, once their freedom had at last been achieved.’

ABSOLUTELY AND FOREVER by Rose Tremain (Chatto & Windus)

‘Marianne Clifford, the child of conventional middle-class parents, has her life ruined by love and deceit. Rose Tremain’s evocative novel is set in rural West Berkshire, London and Paris. It charts the unsteady collapse of Marianne’s teenage dreams amidst the limitations of her life. Neither the future intended for her by her dull parents nor her romantic wishes will be granted in this short, sad and devastating novel, which reveals many unspoken truths about women’s lives in the 1960s.’

THE HOUSE OF DOORS by Tan Twan Eng (Canongate)

‘At once a satisfying murder mystery, a tale of human frailty, and a cool ‘reverse colonial gaze’ at the stultifying British social order of early twentieth century Penang, Tan Twan Eng’s The House of Doors visits big themes: the deadening effect of silence and the transformative power of storytelling. With the action flitting between a notorious real-life murder case in the British colony and Somerset Maugham’s visit there a decade later, this novel unfolds as elegantly as a set of Chinese boxes – or, indeed, a story by Maugham himself.  Its intricate twists and turns lead us to witness the process of creation of stories themselves. Stories that are transformed as they pass from person to person, until we finally understand that the sharing of tales is what connects us as human beings.’

Tickets are now on sale for the Walter Scott Prize event on 13th June 2024 at the Borders Book Festival.  Come along and meet the shortlisted authors!