Sarah Perry crowns a much-garlanded year for her gothic romp, honoured alongside authors including Kiran Millwood Hargrave and JK RowlingTwo word-of-mouth bookselling success stories – Sarah Perry’s novel The Essex Serpent and Kiran Millwood Hargrave’s young adult book The Girl of Ink and Stars – have taken the top prizes at the British Book Awards.A gothic tale inspired by a local legend in the author’s native Essex, Perry’s second novel had an astonishing trajectory, selling more than 200,000 copies in hardback alone – 40 times more than the initial sales target – and scooping up nominations as varied as the Costa fiction award to the Wellcome prize for books about medicine and health. At the ceremony in London on Monday night, Perry’s novel beat Sebastian Barry’s Costa prize-winning novel Days Without End and Paul Beatty’s The Sellout, which won the 2016 Man Booker prize, to take the fiction award, before also winning the overall “book of the year”. Related: Balancing the books: how Waterstones came back from the dead Related: Garth Greenwell on his debut novel: 'I've been cruising since I was 14' Continue reading... Continue reading at 'The Guardian'
[ The Guardian | 2017-05-09 00:00:00 UTC ]