Anthony Quinn wins the Authors' Club Best First Novel Award
Posted by C. J. Schuler, hursday, 8 April 2010

 Anthony Quinn’s The Rescue Man (Jonathan Cape) has won the 2010 Authors’ Club Best First Novel Award at a dinner held last night at The Arts Club.

British novelist Amanda Craig, this year’s guest adjudicator, praised the shortlist as containing six exceptionally well-written, well-plotted and pleasurable first novels, “which do credit to the judges of the Author's Club First Novel Award and to a vintage year in fiction. Each had distinct strengths in terms of comedy, atmosphere, emotional power, characterisation and style; all are rewarding to read. But in the end Anthony Quinn's The Rescue Man won by virtue of displaying all these qualities in a mature, beautifully crafted novel about love, loss and architecture in the Liverpool Blitz.”

The Rescue Man opens on the eve of the Second World War. With uncertainty in the air as the world seems on the brink of disaster, Liverpool is a city tense in anticipation of the coming conflict. Orphaned as a child and now approaching forty with no prospect of a family of his own, Tom Baines is a man emotionally adrift. Unable to commit to anything, either personal or professional, he is left looking in at life from the outside, with only his fascination for architecture to connect him.

The outbreak of war brings a new sense of purpose and unexpected relationships. Baines joins the Rescue Men, retrieving the wounded and dying from bombed buildings. Yet in wartime, ordinary rules are suspended, risks taken and Baines finds himself caught up in a love affair that is as heady and all-consuming as it is transgressive.

With writing that is both immediate and deeply steeped in its time, Anthony Quinn recreates wartime Liverpool with emotional intensity in this powerful story of love found and lost.

The 2010 short list comprised:
After the Fire, A Still Small Voice – Evie Wyld (Jonathan Cape)
Choke Chain– Jason Donald (Jonathan Cape)
Designs for a Happy Home – Matthew Reynolds (Bloomsbury)
The Earth Hums in B Flat – Mari Strachan (Canongate)
The Finest Type of English Womanhood – Rachel Heath (Hutchinson)

The annual Authors’ Club Best First Novel Award is presented to the most promising debut novel written by a British author and first published by a British publisher in the previous year.
C.J.Schuler's full report.