Five more page turners from your 5,000 entries
THESE are the five other finalists, in alphabetical order, and the first paragraphs of their novels...
THE MESSENGER BY JANE CAMMACK
Swashbuckling Victorian melodrama jane, 56, is a former opera singer and mother of two grown-up children from Witney, Oxfordshire. She writes educational and cultural books about Britain for foreign students learning english, and recently completed a diploma in creative writing at Oxford University. Monday morning, eight o’clock. I take the route through Smithfield that goes past newgate prison. I shouldn’t have. I’d forgotten there was a hanging. a mass of people are assembled, crushing each other in eager anticipation to see a man lose his life. a blether of children play at the foot of the gallows which has been set in the open space between the prison and St Sepulchre’s Church.
‘Who’s the poor bastard?’ I ask a young boy. ‘nathaniel Thomas,’ he says. My breath jumps. I know him. He’s a good man.
GETTING AWAY WITH IT BY SUSAN GEE
A schoolgirl kills her friend and tries to frame her abusive stepfather for murder SUSAN, 43, is a part-time administrator for Mosaic, a drugs and alcohol centre for under-25s in Stockport. She is married with two children aged 11 and 14 and has an MA in creative writing from Manchester University. The day that I kill Kirsten I find her in her usual place: on the bench by the river. She looks out over the weir, blonde hair hanging over the blackness of her new coat, as she watches the rushing water through the blue curved railings in front of her. She’s 15, only a few months older than me, but a school year above. Her skin is pale on the curve of her neck and she’s beautiful — I’ve always thought so.
UNQUIET WATERS BY CATHERINE KIRWAN
A dead schoolgirl’s father persuades a solicitor to investigate whether his daughter’s suicide is connected to her having briefly met a film director Catherine, 49, is an unmarried solicitor from Cork who works full-time and writes at weekends and on holidays. She began writing seriously two years ago after fellow members of her book club said how much they enjoyed her reports of their meetings. november 2013: WITH high tide due at 18.42, Finola Fitzpatrick needed to move fast. She saved the document she was working on, logged out and felt around with her feet under the paper-strewn desk. nothing.
She’d forgotten her wellies. now, she needed to move really fast. Cork is built on a bog, over a network of covered rivers and when the tide is high enough, and the rain is heavy enough, and the wind is blowing in the right direction, Cork can do floods better than anywhere else in the country.
GREEN CAR KEYS BROKEN BY FIONA MOTHERWELL
After his mother is injured in a car crash, a severely autistic teenage boy tries to navigate his way alone through London to reach her in hospital FIONA, 46, is a married mother of five and governor of a special needs school. A former high-flying civil servant, she gave up her job when she had her first child. She is Scottish but lives in London. Thursday 7.40pm: The farm was awkwardly placed, but over years of weekly visits alison had worked out a route to avoid the one-way system which Mark found so distressing.
She paused mid-road to open Laa Laa’s chocolate fingers and then again to reach a tissue, and twisted round to wipe his nose. Mark was calm and focused, the crippling intensity of his life temporarily subdued by the joy of horse-riding. He was concentrating on eating chocolate fingers in exact sequence, munching rhythmically.
BLOCKED BY SANDRA SHENNAN
A woman who has developed OCD after the murder of her sister befriends an IT student from New York online to help her track down the killer Sandra, 48, is a former journalist now working on a project to help publicise local businesses. She is married with a grown-up son and lives in Crosby, Merseyside. She was inspired to write a novel after a friend won a fiction prize. I was never very good at maths.
By the time I took my exams in secondary school, quadratic equations, data handling and algebra were a foreign language.
and even at college — though thank God Media Studies doesn’t require anything more trying than finding numbers on a digital TV — divvying up the bill in a restaurant was beyond my capabilities.
So it seems quite preposterous that now, as far as I am concerned, my survival depends on numbers.