Вручение 2008 г.

За произведения 2007-2008 г.г.

Страна: Великобритания Дата проведения: 2008 г.

Лучший дебют

Лауреат
Пол Тордей 4.3
Доктор Альфред Джонс из Лондонского Центра рыболовства получает от некоего таинственного шейха странное предложение: ввести в Йемене спортивные соревнования по ловле лосося. Доктор Джонс отказывается, но абсурдный с научной точки зрения проект попадается на глаза британским политикам, видящим в предложении шейха почти неограниченные возможности. И тут начинается бурная эпистолярная деятельность всех персонажей от премьер-министра до стенографисток, ловля лосося в которой не имеет ровно никакого значения, кроме как отвлечь общественность от более важных вещей, например, от войны в Ираке. Доводы доктора Джонса о громком провале громкого проекта никого не волнуют, впрочем, герой продолжает пытаться жить своей жизнью, будучи сначала пешкой, а затем и жертвой политической игры.
Тана Френч 3.9
Детектив Роб Райан никогда и никому не рассказывал о самом страш­ном дне своего детства, когда двое его друзей бесследно исчезли в лесу, а самого его нашли лишь чудом. Он был весь забрызган кровью и не пом­нил абсолютно ничего. И вот теперь прошлое возвращается...
В том же лесу обнаружено тело жестоко убитой двенадцатилетней Кэти Девлин - и Робу вместе с напарницей Кэсси Мэддокс поручено расследовать это преступление. У Роба нет никаких зацепок - только смутные воспоминания и слухи, окружающие загадочную гибель девочки.
Но интуиция подсказывает: раскрыть тайну смерти Кэти он сможет, если восстановит в памяти то, что случилось с ним много лет назад в лес­ной чаще...
Никита Лалвани 0.0
Rumi Vasi is 10 years, 2 months, 13 days, 2 hours, 42 minutes, and 6 seconds old. She’s figured that the likelihood of her walking home from school with the boy she likes, John Kemble, is 0.2142, a probability severely reduced by the lacy dress and thick woolen tights her father, and Indian émigré, forces her to wear. Rumi is a gifted child, and her father, Mahesh, believes that strict discipline is the key to nurturing her genius if the family has any hope of making its mark on its adoptive country.

Four years later, a teenage Rumi is at the center of an intense campaign by her parents to make her the youngest student ever to attend Oxford University, an effort that requires an unrelenting routine of study. Yet Rumi is growing up like any other normal teen: her mind often drifts to potent distractions . . . from music to love.

Rumi’s parents want nothing other than to give Rumi an exceptional life. As her father outlines ever more regimented study schedules, her mother longs for India and forcefully reminds Rumi of her roots. In the end, the intense expectations of a family with everything to prove will be a combustible ingredient as an intelligent but naive girl is thrust into the adult world before she has time to grow up.

In her stunningly eloquent debut novel, Nikita Lalwani pits a parent’s dream against a child’s. Deftly pondering the complexities and consequences that accompany the best intentions, Gifted explores just how far one person will push another, and how much can be endured, in the name of love.

Advance praise for Gifted
“A triumph . . . fluid, original, clever, glitteringly vivid, funny . . . All the conventional pieties and forms of Indian immigrant identity and trauma are so wittily preempted, and yet there’s a sure grasp, at the serious core of the novel, of the deep reverberations of politics and history. I couldn’t bear it when it ended.”
–Tessa Hadley, author of The Master Bedroom

“This is an outstanding piece of writing–rich, vivid, fluent, and well paced–with a wonderful cast of well-developed, engaging characters and a constantly surprising story line.”
–Gerard Woodward, author of A Curious Earth
Camilla Way 3.2
It was hot everywhere that year. During the long summer holidays the days rolled by in blue and gold, the sun bouncing off the dustbins and burning into windscreens.

By the end of that summer, three of us were dead.

Anita's mother had just died. The family has move to a new town, a new home, and a new neighbourhood and the summer stretches playground for restless kids with nothing better to do.

But what they don't know is that these mines will form the scene of the most unsettling crime that this community has ever known. This summer everything will change. This summer, the dead days have come home to stay.
Джорджина Хардинг 0.0
In 1616, as the last warm days dwindle in the north Atlantic, the men on an English whaling ship prepare to head back toward home. But there is one exception among them: the quiet, headstrong Thomas Cave. For Cave has bet the rest of the crew that he can spend a winter on this Arctic island. Alone.

His shipmates sail away, the days shorten, and the cold weather moves in. Thomas Cave faces months of darkness, ice, and blizzards. He has nothing to his name except his rations, shelter, and a journal—a record in case he doesn't survive to tell his story. But nothing so threatens the willful sailor as his own mind: he is haunted by the remembrances of another life and a lost love. From his post at the edge of the known world, Cave sees his own past, and begins to reflect on man's relationship with God and the wilderness.

A beautiful, ghostly tale, The Solitude of Thomas Cave brings us back to the beginning of the modern world, in a story infused with the violence, power and beauty that define both man and nature.