After apparently just missing out on the Booker Prize by a whisker, Seamus Deane's remarkable fiction debut should perform well in this format. Claustrophobic, but lyrically charged, it concerns a young boy growing up in Northern Ireland in the 1940s and 50s, and both the worlds, real and imagined, that he inhabits. A truly striking first novel. "A masterful transformation of family griefs and political violence into something at once both rhapsodic and heartbreaking" Seamus Heaney.
