If I Gave the Award

With my review of Absolutely & Forever, I have finished the shortlisted books for the 2024 Walter Scott Prize for Historical Fiction. That means it’s time for my feature, where I decide whether the judges got it right.

This year was quite an international event, with books set in England, Trinidad, Italy, Malaysia, and Canada making the shortlist. As has become my usual approach, I’ll start with the books I liked least.

It’s almost a toss-up between two books as to which I should start with, but I think that will be Hungry Ghosts by Kevin Jared Hosein, which for this year was the winning novel. Although I was interested in the setting, the brutality in the book made me comment that if I wasn’t reading it for the prize, I wouldn’t read it at all. This was a novel about a young boy growing up in 1940s Trinidad, his feud with town boys and his father’s affair with a rich woman.

The other book I didn’t like as well was The New Life by Tom Crewe. I thought the subject matter was interesting, loosely based on the lives of two collaborators on a book about sexuality, but I don’t really like explicit sex scenes, and this book had lots of them.

In the Upper Country by Kai Thomas is about Canada’s history with slavery and treatment of indigenous peoples. I commented that Thomas’s approach of telling stories to fit in as much information as possible didn’t work very well for me. I thought there were too many characters, and he was trying to fit in so much in that it got confusing.

My Father’s House by Joseph O’Connor is about a real group of people in Rome during World War II who helped Allied soldiers escape from Nazi-occupied Italy. Although the subject matter was interesting and I enjoyed the book, I commented that as the first of a trilogy, I wondered where the material was going to come from for two more books.

Now, I have got to my two favorites, and I am having a hard time deciding which one to pick. Absolutely & Forever by Rose Tremain is a coming-of-age story, sort of, set in 1960s England. I just loved the voice of its narrator and was captivated by it (although since the 15-year-old heroine was the same age as Tremain in the 1960s, it doesn’t really fit my definition of a historical novel). However, I think I’m going to pick The House of Doors by Tan Twan Eng about, among other things, Somerset Maugham’s visit to Malaysia in the 1920s.