 First edition | |
| Author | Clare Chambers |
|---|---|
| Country | United Kingdom |
| Language | English |
| Genre | |
| Publisher | Weidenfeld & Nicolson |
Publication date | 2020 |
| Pages | 343 |
| ISBN | 978-1474613880 |
| 823.92 | |
Small Pleasures is a historical romance novel written by author Clare Chambers. It was longlisted for the 2021 Women's Prize for Fiction , and featured on the BBC's talk show Between The Covers as a Book of the Week Pick.
Set in 1957, the novel follows Jean Swinney, journalist for a local newspaper who investigates the claim of a woman who says her daughter was the result of a virgin birth. [1] [2]
The book was longlisted for the 2021 Women's Prize for Fiction. [3] [4] [5] [6] [7] [8]
The book was promoted on Sara Cox's BBC talk show Between The Covers as a 'Book of the Week Pick'. [2]
The Booker Prize, formerly the Booker Prize for Fiction (1969–2001) and the Man Booker Prize (2002–2019), is a literary award conferred each year for the best novel written in the English language, which was published in the United Kingdom and Ireland. The winner of the Booker Prize receives international publicity which usually leads to a sales boost. When the prize was created, only novels written by Commonwealth, Irish, and South African citizens were eligible to receive the prize; in 2014 it was widened to any English-language novel—a change that proved controversial.
Catherine Chidgey is a New Zealand novelist, short-story writer and university lecturer. Her honours include the inaugural Prize in Modern Letters; the Katherine Mansfield Fellowship to Menton, France; Best First Book at both the New Zealand Book Awards and the Commonwealth Writers' Prize ; the Acorn Foundation Fiction Prize at the Ockham New Zealand Book Awards on two occasions; and the Janet Frame Fiction Prize.
David Bergen is a Canadian novelist. He has published eleven novels and two collections of short stories since 1993 and is currently based in Winnipeg, Manitoba, Canada. His 2005 novel The Time in Between won the Scotiabank Giller Prize and he was a finalist again in 2010 and 2020, making the long list in 2008.
Alison Pick is a Canadian writer. She is most noted for her Booker Prize-nominated novel Far to Go, and was a winner of the Bronwen Wallace Memorial Award for most promising writer in Canada under 35.
Oneworld Publications is a British independent publishing firm founded in 1986 by Novin Doostdar and Juliet Mabey originally to publish accessible non-fiction by experts and academics for the general market. Based in London, it later added a literary fiction list and both a children's list and an upmarket crime list, and now publishes across a wide range of subjects, including history, politics, current affairs, popular science, religion, philosophy, and psychology, as well as literary fiction, crime fiction and suspense, and children's titles.
Aminatta Forna, OBE, is a Scottish and Sierra Leonean writer. She is the author of a memoir, The Devil That Danced on the Water: A Daughter's Quest, and four novels: Ancestor Stones (2006), The Memory of Love (2010), The Hired Man (2013) and Happiness (2018). Her novel The Memory of Love was awarded the Commonwealth Writers' Prize for "Best Book" in 2011, and was also shortlisted for the Orange Prize for Fiction. Forna is Professor of Creative Writing at Bath Spa University and was, until recently, Sterling Brown Distinguished Visiting professor at Williams College in Massachusetts. She is currently Director and Lannan Foundation Chair of Poetics of the Lannan Center for Poetics and Social Practice at Georgetown University.
Evelyn Rose Strange "Evie" Wyld is an Anglo-Australian author. Her first novel, After the Fire, A Still Small Voice, won the John Llewellyn Rhys Prize in 2009, and her second novel, All the Birds, Singing, won the Encore Award in 2013 and the Miles Franklin Award in 2014. Her third novel, The Bass Rock, won the Stella Prize in 2021.
The Women's Prize for Fiction is one of the United Kingdom's most prestigious literary prizes. It is awarded annually to a female author of any nationality for the best original full-length novel written in English and published in the United Kingdom in the preceding year. A sister prize, the Women's Prize for Non-Fiction, was launched in 2023.
Monique Roffey is a Trinidadian-born British writer and memoirist. Her novels have been much acclaimed, winning awards including the 2013 OCM Bocas Prize for Caribbean Literature, for Archipelago, and the Costa Book of the Year award, for The Mermaid of Black Conch in 2021.
Audrey Magee is an Irish novelist and journalist. Her debut novel, The Undertaking, was nominated for the Baileys Women's Prize for Fiction in 2014. Her novel The Colony was longlisted for the 2022 Booker Prize.
Graeme Macrae Burnet is a Scottish writer, whose novels have won and been nominated for several awards. He has also written occasionally for The Guardian, The Observer and Le Monde. His first novel, The Disappearance of Adèle Bedeau, earned him the Scottish Book Trust New Writer Award in 2013, and his second novel, His Bloody Project (2015), was shortlisted for the 2016 Man Booker Prize. His third novel, The Accident on the A35, is a sequel to The Disappearance ofAdèle Bedeau. In 2017, he won the Author of the Year category in the Sunday Herald Culture Awards. One review in The Guardian described Burnet's novels as an experiment with a genre that might be called "false true crime". In July 2022, Burnet's novel Case Study (2021) was named on the longlist of the Booker Prize.
Ayọ̀bámi Adébáyọ̀ is a Nigerian writer. Her 2017 debut novel, Stay With Me, won the 9mobile Prize for Literature and the Prix Les Afriques. She was awarded The Future Awards Africa Prize for Arts and Culture in 2017.
Yewande Omotoso is a South African-based novelist, architect and designer, who was born in Barbados and grew up in Nigeria. She currently lives in Johannesburg. Her two published novels have earned her considerable attention, including winning the South African Literary Award for First-Time Published Author, being shortlisted for the South African Sunday Times Fiction Prize, the M-Net Literary Awards 2012, and the 2013 Etisalat Prize for Literature, and being longlisted for the 2017 Bailey's Women's Prize for Fiction. She is the daughter of Nigerian writer Kole Omotoso, and the sister of filmmaker Akin Omotoso.
David John Young is an English novelist whose crime thriller series featuring a fictional Volkspolizei detective, Karin Müller, is set in 1970s East Germany. Young's debut novel Stasi Child won the 2016 CWA Endeavour Historical Dagger for the best historical crime novel of the year. Both it and the follow-up, Stasi Wolf, were longlisted for the Theakston's Old Peculier Crime Novel of the Year Award in 2016 and 2017 respectively. In 2017, Bonnier Zaffre, the UK adult fiction division of the Bonnier Group, announced Young had signed a six-figure deal for three further novels in the series, making five in all, with the third, A Darker State, being published in February 2018. Young says the inspiration for the series came after his indie pop band The Candy Twins toured Germany in 2007 and he read Anna Funder's non-fiction book Stasiland between gigs. He secured the tour thanks to favourable comments made by Edwyn Collins about a tribute song Young wrote about him. Before becoming a full-time novelist, Young was a news producer and editor for more than 25 years with BBC World Service radio and BBC World TV.
Jessie Greengrass is a British author. She won a Somerset Maugham Award and the Edge Hill Short Story Prize for her debut short story collection.
Girl, Woman, Other is the eighth novel by Bernardine Evaristo. Published in 2019 by Hamish Hamilton, it follows the lives of 12 characters in the United Kingdom over the course of several decades. The book was the co-winner of the 2019 Booker Prize, alongside Margaret Atwood's The Testaments.
Shuggie Bain is the debut novel by Scottish-American writer Douglas Stuart, published in 2020. It tells the story of the youngest of three children, Shuggie, growing up with his alcoholic mother Agnes in 1980s post-industrial working-class Glasgow.
Between the Covers is a BBC talk show hosted by Sara Cox in which guest stars talk about their favourite books, alongside other book picks as well.
The 2022 Booker Prize was a literary award given for the best English novel of the year. It was announced on 17 October 2022, during a ceremony hosted by Sophie Duker at the Roundhouse in London. The longlist was announced on 26 July 2022. The shortlist was announced on 6 September. Leila Mottley, at 20, was the youngest longlisted writer to date, and Alan Garner, at 87, the oldest. The majority of the 13 titles were from independent publishers. The prize was awarded to Shehan Karunatilaka for his novel, The Seven Moons of Maali Almeida, receiving £50,000. He is the second Sri Lankan to win the prize, after Michael Ondaatje.
The Seven Moons of Maali Almeida is a 2022 novel by Sri Lankan author Shehan Karunatilaka. It won the 2022 Booker Prize, the announcement being made at a ceremony at the Roundhouse in London on 17 October 2022. The Seven Moons of Maali Almeida was published on 4 August 2022 by the small independent London publisher Sort of Books (ISBN 978-1908745903). An earlier, unrevised version of the novel was originally published in the Indian subcontinent as Chats with the Dead in 2020.