FROM PUBLISHING NEWS

Booksellers welcome first Elliott Prize Longlist

BOOKSELLERS HAVE GIVEN a warm welcome to the inaugural long list for the Desmond Elliott Prize, praising its breadth, depth and quality and its appeal to a readership seeking intelligent and thought-provoking yet page-turning fiction. Waterstone's, Borders and Blackwell's have agreed to promote the list, as have Amazon, Gardners and Bertrams.

The response of James Daunt of Daunt's Bookshops was typical. “That's a good list. They're all books we've sold in hardback and we'll sell them again in paperback. If someone turned up at the till with all of those I'd think they'd have a very nice time.”

At Bertrams, Buying Manager Joanne Hilliard thought it “a selection to be proud of, and really great to see a good spread of publishers”. She noted that “with the majority of the list already having proved themselves in hardback, it's going to be difficult to predict the winner”.

The list comprises:

Broken by Daniel Clay (Harper Press);

Submarine by Joe Dunthorne (Hamish Hamilton);

The Truth About These Strange Times by Adam Foulds (Weidenfeld);

The Outcast by Sadie Jones (Chatto);

Gifted by Nikita Lalwani (Viking);

Kill Your Friends by John Niven (Heinemann);

Gods Behaving Badly by Marie Phillips (Vintage);

Random Acts of Heroic Love by Danny Scheinmann (Doubleday);

Child 44 by Tom Rob Smith (Simon & Schuster);

Sunday at The Cross Bones by John Walsh (Fourth Estate); and

The Messenger of Athens by Anne Zouroudi (Bloomsbury).