Desmond Elliott Prize 2015

The Desmond Elliott Prize is awarded for new fiction, with the judges searching for a "novel which has a compelling narrative, arresting characters and which is both vividly written and confidently realised.".

This year's shortlist has definitely found novels with those qualities. On July 1 the £10,000 prize will be awarded to either Carys Bray for A Song for Issy Bradley, Claire Fuller for Our Endless Numbered Days or Emma Healey for Elizabeth is Missing.

All three books are absolutely brilliant, and I don't envy the judges picking a winner. If you haven't read them, here are my thoughts on each book (with a link to my full review in the title).

A Song for Issy Bradley by Carys Bray
Synopsis: A Mormon family has to deal with their grief after the loss of a child.
Bray has created a story about faith in family, about the bonds of love that bind people together, even after someone has died, about the ways in which humans are tested and the ways in which they survive. It's a story about grief that moved me to tears for a family that I loved and mourned with.

Our Endless Numbered Days by Claire Fuller
Synopsis: A young girl is taken to live in the forest by her survivalist father, and told that the rest of the world has ended.
Our Endless Numbered Days is so, so dark, but it was only as I approached the end that I realised just how dark the book is...the writing style almost reminds me of original fairytales, where princesses didn't live happily ever after.

Elizabeth is Missing by Emma Healey
Synopsis: As Maud, 82, gets increasingly worried about her friend, Elizabeth, who is missing, past and present collide.
It's stunningly written, and will give you palpitations, and it's worth every penny (and I believe there were a lot of them) that Viking stumped up for it.

Book review: A Song for Issy Bradley by Carys Bray

There is no word in the English language to describe a parent who has lost their child, no way to signify to someone in just one word that this is a person who is grieving, who is trying to come to terms with an unspeakable loss.

How we grieve, how a parent grieves, is at the centre of Carys Bray's wonderful debut novel A Song for Issy Bradley. When Issy Bradley dies, her strict Mormon family all deal in different ways. Issy's mum Claire is consumed by grief, taking to Issy's bed for weeks, unable to cope with her husband Ian's blind faith in his faith, which he has turned to more than ever to deal with Issy's death. Their oldest daughter Zippy finds her faith being challenged for the first time in her life, as she battles between her grief at losing Issy and her desire to be a typical teenage girl. Her brother Alma addresses the loss by continuing to push against the Mormon faith, but discovers that it may not be that easy. And youngest child Jacob is optimistic that Issy will come back, that a miracle will occur and his sister will return to him.

Faith, or the lack of it, is a preoccupation of A Song for Issy Bradley. Bray, who was brought up Mormon, left the church in her thirties, almost the opposite of Claire, who in the book we find out became a Mormon because of her relationship with Ian. Claire takes on the Mormon faith willingly, but still rails against it sometimes, finding it difficult to reconcile her needs for herself and her family with the demands placed on her by her faith. Claire is cynical, she gets offended, she wants to be selfish - all perfectly human traits but ones that don't always sit well with her faith.