Prizes Prizes Prizes

September kicks off the season of literary prizes, with the announcement of the winner of the Women's Prize for Fiction - the extraordinary Piranesi, by Susannah Clarke (reviewed by Mrs Cummings below) - and the Booker Prize shortlist. The Booker prize-winner will be announced on November 3rd, which means that this year's SPS Predict the Booker evening will take place just after half term. 

For those of you unfamiliar with Predict the Booker, this is what happens: a panel of student readers each choose one of the books on the shortlist, and make the case for it to win (and occasionally NOT to win), before the audience decides which book will get their vote - a bit like a literary balloon debate. If you'd like to get involved as one of this year's speakers, please contact Mrs Cummings, or pop along to the library to choose which book you'd like to recommend.  

The SPS track record for successfully predicting the winner has been, er, mixed - you can find out more about our 2020 predictions here, and our 2019's here - but it's always a highly entertaining (and illuminating) evening. We hope that lots of you will come along, or watch from home, as we'll be streaming the event again this year: so do get involved - it's a lot of fun!  

'Piranesi lives in the House. Perhaps he always has.'

Piranesi lives in the House, which is his world. It has endless corridors and an infinite number of rooms. Everywhere there are statues, each different from the next, and inside the House an ocean is imprisoned, with tides and waves flooding the staircases. Piranesi lives completely alone apart from a twice-weekly visitor who brings incongruous gifts. But then messages start to appear, scratched into the fabric of the House, and the space which Piranesi thought was safe and understood becomes strange and dangerous.

This is an absolutely magical book. You enter the world of Susanna Clarke’s astonishing imagination and while you’re in there, nothing else matters. This is a book to read in one sitting, immersed, and when you finish you will still have the sound of the waves in your ears and you will be startled by the real world. It is my book of the year, and indeed probably my favourite book of many years.

Susanna Clarke’s earlier work Jonathan Strange and Mr Norrell was hugely successful but there has been a lengthy gap between it and this, her second book. During that time she has been ill with chronic fatigue and thought she would never write again. Her first book is a doorstop coming in at over 1,000 pages. This is a very slim volume in comparison at only 272 pages and it would be easy to feel cheated at how short it is. But every word counts and the writing is lyrical and elegant. Please do read it, it is wonderful.

You can see Bernadine Evaristo announcing the Women's Prize for Fiction winner here: - it's about 28 minutes in!