Annal:2006 Costa Book Award for Novel
From AwardAnnals
Results of the Costa Book Award in the year 2006. For a ranked list of books, try an honor roll:
Restless: A Novel
- 2006 Costa-Novel winner
- Score: 10.56
It is Paris, 1939. Twenty-eight year old Eva Delectorskaya is at the funeral of her beloved younger brother. Standing among her family and friends she notices a stranger. Lucas Romer is a patrician looking Englishman with a secretive air and a persuasive manner. He also has a mysterious connection to Kolia, Eva’s murdered brother. Romer recruits Eva and soon she is traveling to Scotland to be trained as a spy and work for his underground network. After a successful covert operation in Belgium, she is sent to New York City, where she is involved in manipulating the press in order to shift American public sentiment toward getting involved in WWII.
Three decades on and Eva has buried her dangerous history. She is now Sally Gilmartin, a respectable English widow, living in a picturesque Cotswold village. No one, not even her daughter Ruth, knows her real identity. But once a spy, always a spy. Sally has far too many secrets, and she has no one to trust. Before it is too late, she must confront the demons of her past. This time though she can’t do it alone, she needs Ruth’s help. Restless…
Black Swan Green: A Novel
- 2006 Costa-Novel shortlist
- 2005 LATimes–Fiction finalist
- Score: 12.56
From award-winning writer David Mitchell comes a sinewy, meditative novel of boyhood on the cusp of adulthood and the old on the cusp of the new.
Black Swan tracks a single year in what is, for thirteen-year-old Jason Taylor, the sleepiest village in muddiest Worcestershire in a dying Cold War England, 1982. But the thirteen chapters, each a short story in its own right, create an exquisitely observed world that is anything but sleepy. A world of Kissingeresque realpolitik enacted in boys’ games on a frozen lake; of “nightcreeping” through the summer backyards of strangers; of the tabloid-fueled…
- 2006 Costa-Novel shortlist
- Score: 6.56
Under a searing Calabrian sky, detective Daniel Wright is shown the world's most famous stolen painting—“Caravaggio's Nativity”. As a Caravaggio lover and expert in art recovery, he is determined to rescue it from the mafia bosses who use it as payment for drug deals and assassinations. Risking his marriage, his career and his life, Daniel defies his superiors and goes beyond the law with the help of Uffizi Gallery curator Francesca Natali in a desperate bid to save the Caravaggio before it is lost forever. But will he become the hero of the art establishment, or has he dangerously underestimated its mafia underworld? Saving Caravaggio is a thrilling story of intrigue and personal crusades, that combines the dark atmosphere of Naples with a determined pursuit of passion.
A Spot of Bother: A Novel
- 2006 Costa-Novel shortlist
- Score: 6.56
George Hall is an unobtrusive man. A little distant, perhaps, a little cautious, not at quite at ease with the emotional demands of fatherhood, or manly bonhomie. He does not understand the modern obsession with talking about everything. “The secret of contentment, George felt, lay in ignoring many things completely.” Some things in life, however, cannot be ignored.
At 61, George is settling down to a comfortable retirement, building a shed in his garden, reading historical novels and listening to a bit of light jazz. Then his tempestuous daughter, Katie, announces that she is getting re-married, to the deeply inappropriate Ray. Her family is not pleased—as her brother Jamie observes, Ray has “strangler’s hands.” Katie can’t decide if she loves Ray, or loves the wonderful way he has with her son Jacob, and her mother Jean is a bit put out by all the planning and arguing the wedding has occasioned, which get in the way of her quite fulfilling late-life affair with one of her husband’s ex-colleagues. And the tidy and pleasant life Jamie has created crumbles when he fails…
