Costa living

The Costa Book Prize shortlist has just come round again...and while the big question might be can Hilary Mantel do the double and repeat her Booker success with the wonderful Wolf Hall, many eyes are also on the 1st Novel Award in the hopes of spotting the emerging talent of the next decade.

The Costa Awards are split among 5 categories and this year attracted nearly 600 entries.

Nmaes to watch out for in the 1st Novel section include Rachel Heath, whose Finest >Type Of English Womanhood is set in the immediate post-war years and tells of two young womens' yearning to escape the confines of their respective upbrinings and how, eventually, their paths cross in South Africa with potentially disastrous consequences. Meanwhile fellow first-timer Peter Murphy (not the Bauhaus singer, one assumes) opts for a theme of love, families and betrayal as discerned through the watchful adolescent eyes of his central character in John The Revelator; small town sesibilities are ruffled when a Rimbaudian boy wonder strolls into town and into the narrator's life and, inevitably, things get complicated. Still with first novels, Beauty by Rachel Selbourne is the story of the eponymous heroine who has escaped from an abusive arranged marriage in Bangladesh only to find herself confronted with Brit offialdom. Finally, Ali's Shaw's The Girl With The Glass Feet is a metaphorical love story involving Ida, who is slowly turning to glass from the feet up and her paramour, Midas, whose heart Ida slowly melts...but will they be able to reverse Ida's condition or will their dreams be smashed??

The big guns are wheeled out for the Novel award in which Mantel vies against Penelope Lively (Family Album), Chris Nicholson (The Elephant Keeper), and Colm Toibin (Brooklyn); The Children's award pits Patrick Ness (The Ask & The Answer) against Siobhan David (Solace Of The Road), Mary Hoffamn (Troubador) and Anna Perera (Guantanamo); the Poetry section, meanwhile, sees stalwart Clive James (Angels Over Elsinore) battling it out (do poets battle??) with Christopher Reid (A Scattering), pipped Laureate-manque Ruth Padel (Darwin:A Life In Poetry) and Katharine Kilalea for One Eyed Leigh.

For Biogs, the shortlist features Graham Farmelo for Strangest Man, a biog of Paul Dirac, William Fiennes for The Music Room, Caroline Moorhead for The Precipice and the late simon Gray for Coda.

Plenty among these fine books to both fill your stocking and reassure us that there are great new writers on the horizon and loads to read and savour in 2010. Meanwhile, my money's on Hilary Mantel, for, while purists might pour scorn, Wolf Hall is easily my favourite read of the year.