When Sue Roebuck told me she was awarding me the Booker Award I gave her a look like this @_@
I know what Booker award winning books are like – I’ve read a lot of them – and most of them are pretty dampening on the spirits. They’ll be about a man, or a woman, who suffers and angsts in an intellectually literary way for 400 pages and nothing much happens. If something does happen it will be harrowing for the characters involved. A couple of times I have been so brain dead by the time I have reached the climax that I have turned the page and missed it.
Yes, I’m a Philistine. give me genre fiction all the way.
Anyhow, once I’d had it explained to me that THIS Booker Award isn’t an award at all but a meme to do with picking your top five best novels I felt quite chipper because my favourite novels are AWESOME. There are a lot more than five so I’ll go for the first that came to mind in no particular order of preference.
The website for the White Horse in Weston Stanage proclaimed that it was “the quintessential English Pub”, its qualifications comprising a lovely view over the village green, a proudly independent selection of superb real ales, simple well-cooked food and quirky architecture. Including the exposed beams in the ceiling of the publican’s bedroom, of which Hugh had a sudden and unwanted view as Tom pushed himself up and stared, appalled, at the bedroom door.
Paula Sophia: Hystericus came from a workshop exercise where we were instructed to write something about a true-life experience. I had initially sent it to a friend of mine who was putting together a book about transgender women, The New Goddess, Transgender Women in the Twenty-First Century, published by Fine Tooth Press. The editor decided not to use the story, instead using some of my poetry – several slam pieces I’d written during my short career as a slam poet.
Elin Gregory 