This is where the Sunday Times Young Writer of the Year comes in. From its inception in 1991, this prestigious award (open to writers under the age of 35, for a published work) has had a superb track record in spotting the very best talent. Helen Simpson, one of Britain’s finest short-story writers, was our first winner, and subsequent holders of the title have included the historians William Dalrymple and Patrick French, the poets Simon Armitage and Paul Farley, and novelists Sarah Waters and Zadie Smith.
This year’s shortlist will add another name to that distinguished line-up. The four contenders (Tobias Hill, Tobias Jones, Robert Macfarlane and Charlotte Mendelson) have produced works that demonstrate startling originality of thought and expression as well as page-turning readability. All are highly recommended; only one can win.
Hill made his name as a poet, but he has also written a collection of short stories (Skin) and he moved to longer fiction with the literary thriller Underground. His third novel, The Cryptographer (Faber), is set in the future and pits Anna Moore, an Inland Revenue investigator, against John Law, the tax-dodging inventor of a system of electronic money. Our reviewer Peter Parker called it “a supremely elegant and ambitious thriller”.
Jones’s The Dark Heart of Italy (Faber) was characterised by our reviewer Michael Dibdin as “a provocative, unabashed and bang-up-to-date polemic”. The book mercilessly anatomises the faultlines of a country transformed in recent years by the figure of Silvio Berlusconi, about whom Jones “conducts the case for the prosecution with vigour and a nicely judged level of righteous indignation”. On subjects as various as football, the Church and the media, Jones is bold, informative and acutely observant.
Mendelson’s debut novel, Daughters of Jerusalem (Picador), is set in Oxford, in a brilliantly observed milieu of distracted academics and their needy children. Two sisters — intelligent, jealous Eve and manipulative, spoilt Phoebe — dominate the story as, in their very different ways, they become entangled in the adult world. Reviewing the book in these pages, Margaret Walters praised its “wittily jaundiced view of 1980s Oxford” and drew attention to its exploration of “deeper and darker emotions”: this is acerbic social comedy of the most unflinching, satisfying kind.
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Macfarlane’s Mountains of the Mind (Granta) is also a first book, an exploration of landscape and memory centred on his fascination with the world’s mountainous regions. John Carey’s review called it “an anatomy of an obsession — his own, and that of fellow-climbers”, which draws adroitly on history and geology in its evocation of the lure of high places. “By far the best parts of the book, however, are not historical but personal ”, Carey wrote. The brilliance of Macfarlane’s observation makes you feel you are in the mountains with him.
The judges this year are myself (literary editor), Andrew Holgate (deputy literary editor) and Peter Kemp (fiction editor). We will announce our decision in September.
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