The Walter Scott Prize for Historical Fiction is one of the most prestigious literary prizes in the world. Sponsored by the Duke and Duchess of Buccleuch, the Prize celebrates quality, innovation and ambition of writing. For consideration for the prize, the majority of the storyline must have taken place at least 60 years ago.
The prize was founded in 2009, and is awarded at the Borders Book Festival in Melrose, Scotland, in June every year.
The New Life by Tom Crewe (book and ebook available)
John Addington is married to Catherine, but has spent his life trying to navigate his desires for men. Now there is Frank, the working-class printer he meets at the Serpentine swimming lake. Henry Ellis is married to Edith, but she has fallen in love with Angelica, who wants Edith all for herself. These two Victorian marriages, each an unexpected love triangle, are stalked by guilt and shame. But they are also in the vanguard of new ideas for social equality, women’s rights and relationships which break convention. ‘The New Life’ explores the possibilities of love and life, set against the riveting backdrop of the Oscar Wilde trial.
Hungry Ghosts by Kevin Jared Hosein (book available)
The music was still playing when Dalton Changoor vanished into thin air. On a hill overlooking Bell Village sits the Changoor farm, where Dalton and Marlee Changoor live in luxury unrecognisable to those who reside in the farm’s shadow. Down below is the barrack, a ramshackle building of wood and tin, divided into rooms occupied by whole families. Among these families are the Saroops – Hans, Shweta, and their son, Krishna, who live hard lives of backbreaking work, grinding poverty and devotion to faith. When Dalton Changoor goes missing and Marlee’s safety is compromised, farmhand Hans is lured by the promise of a handsome stipend to move to the farm as watchman. But as the mystery of Dalton’s disappearance unfolds their lives become hellishly entwined, and the small community altered forever.
For Thy Great Pain, Have Mercy On My Little Pain by Victoria MacKenzie (ebook available)
In the year of 1413, two women meet for the first time in the city of Norwich. Margery has left her fourteen children and husband behind to make her journey. Her visions of Christ – which have long alienated her from her family and neighbours, and incurred her husband’s abuse – have placed her in danger with the men of the Church, who have begun to hound her as a heretic. Julian, an anchoress, has not left Norwich, nor the cell to which she has been confined, for twenty – three years. She has told no one of her own visions – and knows that time is running out for her to do so. The two women have stories to tell one another. Stories about girlhood, motherhood, sickness, loss, doubt and belief; revelations more the powerful than the world is ready to hear.
Music In The Dark by Sally Magnusson (book available)
1884. In a tenement room and kitchen in the town of Rutherglen, near Glasgow, a woman with stark injuries to her face and her mind, and a man who has recently arrived from America, spend the night together. As the night progresses, the couple discover that their past lives were once entwined in ways they hadn’t realised, and that they are linked by a shared past; the eviction of Greenyards, Strathcarron in 1854. Separately and together the couple reflect on the shocking brutality of the glen’s clearance thirty years earlier, exploring notions of love, commitment, trauma and happiness, and discovering what it means to take care of another person’s soul.
Cuddy by Benjamin Myers (book available)
Travelling through the wilderness, a young woman has visions of a cathedral on a hill. The downtrodden wife of an archer seeks the truth in stone walls, in meadows full of garlic flowers. A group of soldiers sit out their last hours before their death under a vaulted ceiling. The professor receives unwelcome night-time visitors. A young man bids his dying mother goodbye, and sets off on his first day of work as a labourer. From these seeds of historical truth and strange mythology, Benjamin Myers spins an unforgettable story of love and loss that breaks free of realism, entering a thrilling space both hilarious and terrifying. Unfolding over centuries, deploying a panoply of voices, Cuddy is written with Myers’ inimitable humour, pathos and grace – and confirms him as one of the most important writers of his generation.
My Father’s House by Joseph O’Connor (book and ebook available)
September 1943: German forces occupy Rome. SS officer Paul Hauptmann rules with terror. The war’s outcome is far from certain. An Irish priest, Hugh O’Flaherty, dedicates himself to helping those escaping from the Nazis. His home is Vatican City, the world’s smallest state, a neutral, independent country within Rome where the occupiers hold no sway. Here Hugh brings together an unlikely band of friends to hide the vulnerable under the noses of the enemy. But Hauptmann’s net begins closing in on the Escape Line and the need for a terrifyingly audacious mission grows critical. By Christmastime, it’s too late to turn back.
The Fraud by Zadie Smith (book available)
Truth and fiction. Jamaica and Britain. Who deserves to tell their story? Zadie Smith returns with her first historical novel. Kilburn, 1873. The ‘Tichborne Trial’ has captivated the widowed Scottish housekeeper Mrs Eliza Touchet and all of England. Readers are at odds over whether the defendant is who he claims to be – or an imposter. Mrs Touchet is a woman of many interests: literature, justice, abolitionism, class, her novelist cousin and his wives, this life and the next. But she is also sceptical. She suspects England of being a land of faades, in which nothing is quite what it seems. Andrew Bogle meanwhile finds himself the star witness, his future depending on telling the right story. Growing up enslaved on the Hope Plantation, Jamaica, he knows every lump of sugar comes at a human cost. That the rich deceive the poor. And that people are more easily manipulated than they realise.
Mister Timeless Blyth by Alan Spence (ebook available)
Lovers of Haiku, Zen, and Japan will find this novel truly inspiring! This is the story of Reginald Horace Blyth – poet, scholar, musician, linguist and avid student of Zen – who ultimately became the teacher to an emperor. His pivotal works were published in Japan even while he was imprisoned as an enemy alien. He ultimately became the key link and mediator between the Imperial Household and the occupying American forces. His fingerprints are everywhere today in the study of Zen and Haiku in the West, where his works have influenced some of the most important writers of the 20th century – including Huxley, Oshi, Aiken, Watts, Salinger, Kerouac, Ginsberg and many others. Written in the form of an autobiography and filled with spirituality and poetry, this book recounts a life of hard work, of discovery, of great joy and adversity, and of learning to be at peace with one’s self and one’s choices.
The House Of Doors by Tan Twan Eng (book and ebook available)
It is 1921 and at Cassowary House in the Straits Settlements of Penang, Robert Hamlyn is a well-to-do lawyer and his steely wife Lesley a society hostess. Their lives are invigorated when Willie, an old friend of Robert’s, comes to stay. Willie Somerset Maugham is one of the greatest writers of his day. But he is beleaguered by an unhappy marriage, ill-health and business interests that have gone badly awry. He is also struggling to write. The more Lesley’s friendship with Willie grows, the more clearly she see him as he is – a man who has no choice but to mask his true self. As Willie prepares to leave and face his demons, Lesley confides secrets of her own, including how she came to know the charismatic Dr Sun Yat Sen, a revolutionary fighting to overthrow the imperial dynasty of China.
In The Upper Country by Kai Thomas (book available)
In 1859, deep in the forests of Canada, an elderly woman sits behind bars. She came to Dunmore via the Underground Railroad to escape enslavement, but an American bounty hunter tracked her down. Now she’s in jail for killing him, and the fragile peace of Dunmore, a town settled by people fleeing the American south, hangs by a thread. Lensinda Martin, a smart young reporter, wants to gather the woman’s testimony before she can be condemned, but the old woman has no time for confessions. Instead she proposes a barter: a story for a story. As the women swap stories – of family and first loves, of survival and freedom against all odds – Lensinda must face her past. And it seems the old woman may carry a secret that could shape Lensinda’s destiny.
Absolutely And Forever by Rose Tremain (book available)
Marianne Clifford, teenage daughter of a peppery army colonel and his vain wife, Lal, falls helplessly and absolutely for Simon Hurst, 18, whose cleverness and physical beauty suggest that he will go forward into a successful and monied future, helped on by doting parents. But fate intervenes. Simon’s plans are blown off course, and Marianne is forced to bury her dreams of a future together. Narrating her own story, characterising herself as ignorant and unworthy, Marianne’s telling use of irony and smart thinking gradually suggest to us that she has underestimated her own worth. We begin to believe that – in the end, supported by her courageous Scottish friend, Petronella – she will find the life she never stops craving. But what we can’t envisage is that beneath his blithe exterior, Simon Hurst has been nursing a secret which will alter everything.
A Better Place by Stephen Daisley (ebook available)
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