Notices Contact Gift Wrapping

Costa Book Award


The Costa Book Awards (previously known as the Whitbread Literary Awards) is one of the most prestigious and popular literary prizes in the UK.  The awards, launched in 1971, are given both for high literary merit but also for works that are enjoyable reading and whose aim is to convey the enjoyment of reading to the widest possible audience.


The Costa Book Awards recognise books by writers based in the UK and Ireland.

There are five categories: First Novel, Novel, Biography, Poetry and Children's Book. One of these five books is selected as the overall winner of the Book of the Year.


Website: www.costabookawards.com


Lastest News

The Costa Book Prize for 2010 Novel was won by Maggie O'Farrell for The Hand That First Held Mine. The Costa Biography Award was won by Edmund De Waal for The Hare With Amber Eyes

Poet Christopher Reid has won the 2009 Costa Book of the Year award for his collection, A Scattering, a tribute to his wife Lucinda Gane following her death in 2005.

The category winners have been announced for the Costa Awards. They are: 

 Novel:        Brooklyn - Colm TóibinChildren: The Ask and the Answer - Patrick Ness
 First Novel: Beauty - Raphael SelbournePoetry:   A Scattering - Christopher Reid
 Biography:  The Strangest Man - Graham Farmelo

Behind the Scenes at the Museum

Behind the Scenes at the Museum

Ruby Lennox was conceived grudgingly by Bunty and born while her father, George, was in the Dog and Hare in Doncaster telling a woman in an emerald dress and a D-cup that he wasn't married. Bunty had never wanted to marry George, but here she was, stuck in a flat above the pet shop in an ancient street beneath York Minster, with sensible and sardonic Patrica aged five, greedy cross-patch Gillian...

$28.61  $27.19

Buy Now

Brooklyn

Brooklyn

Young Eilis Lacey dreams of life beyond the confines of her tiny Irish village, but unlike her beautiful sister, Rose, Eilis' gifts are of a more practical nature: she has a head for numbers, and is a loving and dutiful daughter. Yet her ambition cannot be hidden and is soon noted by the parish priest, Father Flood. Via a church contact, he arranges for Eilis to travel to America, where a job...

$40.88  $35.76

Buy Now

Child 44

Child 44

This novel is an amazingly assured and exciting debut, set in Soviet Russia in 1953, with a wonderfully realised sense of all-pervading fear and the desperateness of a chilling race against time. How do you solve an impossible crime?MGB Officer Leo is a man who never questions the Party Line. He arrests whomever he is told to arrest. He dismisses the horrific death of a young boy because he is...

$35.76  $33.98

Buy Now

Day

Day

Alfred Day wanted his war. In its turmoil he found his proper purpose as the tail-gunner in a Lancaster bomber; he found the wild, dark fellowship of his crew, and - most extraordinary of all - he found Joyce, a woman to love. But that's all gone now - the war took it away. Maybe it took him, too. Now in 1949, employed as an extra in a war film that echoes his real experience, Day begins to...

$27.59  $26.21

Buy Now

Ordinary Thunderstorms

Ordinary Thunderstorms

What is the devastating effect on your life when, through no fault of your own, you lose everything - home, family, friends, job, reputation, passport, money, credit cards, mobile phone - and you can never get them back? This is what happens to a young man called Adam Kindred, one May evening in Chelsea, London, when a freakish series of malign accidents and a split-second decision turns his life...

$39.86  $37.86

Buy Now

Restless

Restless

Someone is trying to kill Sally Gilmartin. It is the summer of 1976, and the only person she can trust is her daughter, Ruth, a young single mother struggling with her own demons. Now Sally must tell her daughter the truth: She is actually Eva Delectorskaya, a Russian emigre recruited for the British Secret Service in 1939. Soon Ruth is drawn deeper into the astonishing events of her mother's...

$28.61  $27.19

Buy Now

Small Island

Small Island

It is 1948, and England is recovering from a war. But at 21 Nevern Street, London, the conflict has only just begun. Queenie Bligh's neighbours do not approve when she agrees to take in Jamaican lodgers, but Queenie doesn't know when her husband will return, or if he will come back at all. What else can she do? Gilbert Joseph was one of the several thousand Jamaican men who joined the RAF to...

$28.61  $27.19

Buy Now

Somewhere Towards the End

Somewhere Towards the End

Diana Athill made her reputation as a writer with the candour of her memoirs, now aged ninety, and freed from any inhibitions that even she may once have had, she reflects frankly on the losses and occasionally the gains that old age brings, and on the wisdom and fortitude required to face death. This is a lively narrative of events, lovers and friendships: the people and experiences that have...

$30.66  $29.13

Buy Now

The Accidental

The Accidental

The Smart family's lacklustre holiday in Norwich is turned upside down when a beguiling stranger called Amber appears, bringing with her love, joy, pain and upheaval. The Smarts try to make sense of their bewildering emotions as Amber tramples over family boundaries and forces them to think about their world and themselves in an entirely new way. "The Accidental" is at once a mysterious...

$27.60  $26.22

Buy Now

The Amber Spyglass

The Amber Spyglass

'We're going to the land of the dead and we're going to come back' - Will and Lyra, whose fates are bound together by powers beyond their own worlds, have been violently separated. But they must find each other, for ahead of them lies the greatest war that has ever been - and a journey to a dark place from which no-one has ever returned...

$23.00  $21.85

Buy Now

The Ask and the Answer

The Ask and the Answer

We were in the square, in the square where I'd run, holding her, carrying her, telling her to stay alive, stay alive till we got safe, till we got to Haven so I could save her - But there weren't no safety, no safety at all, there was just him and his men...Fleeing before a relentless army, Todd has carried a desperately wounded Viola right into the hands of their worst enemy, Mayor Prentiss....

$35.76  $33.98

Buy Now

The Ask and the Answer

The Ask and the Answer

"We were in the square, in the square where I'd run, holding her, carrying her, telling her to stay alive, stay alive till we got safe, till we got to Haven so I could save her - But there weren't no safety, no safety at all, there was just him and his men.." .Fleeing before a relentless army, Todd has carried a desperately wounded Viola right into the hands of their worst enemy, Mayor Prentiss....

$28.61  $27.19

Buy Now

The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time

The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time

The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time is a murder mystery novel like no other. The detective, and narrator, is Christopher Boone. Christopher is fifteen and has Asperger's, a form of autism. He knows a very great deal about maths and very little about human beings. He loves lists, patterns and the truth. He hates the colours yellow and brown and being touched. He has never gone...

$27.59  $26.21

Buy Now

The Hand That First Held Mine

The Hand That First Held Mine

A gorgeously written story of love and motherhood, this is a tour de force from one of our most acclaimed and best loved novelists. When the bohemian, sophisticated Innes Kent turns up by chance on her doorstep, Lexie Sinclair realises she cannot wait any longer for her life to begin, and leaves for London. There, at the heart of the 1950s Soho art scene, she carves out a new life for herself,...

$39.99  $38.00

Buy Now

The Hare With Amber Eyes: A Hidden Inheritance

The Hare With Amber Eyes: A Hidden Inheritance

264 wood and ivory carvings, none of them larger than a matchbox: potter Edmund de Waal was entranced when he first encountered the collection in the Tokyo apartment of his great uncle Iggie. Later, when Edmund inherited the 'netsuke', they unlocked a story far larger than he could ever have imagined. The Ephrussis came from Odessa, and at one time were the largest grain exporters in the world;...

$29.99  $28.49

Buy Now

The Harmony Silk Factory

The Harmony Silk Factory

This is a landmark work of fiction from one of Britain's most exciting new writers. "The Harmony Silk Factory" is a devastating love story set against the turmoil of mid-twentieth century Malaysia. Set in Malaysia in the 1930s and 40s, with the rumbling of the Second World War in the background and the Japanese about to invade, "The Harmony Silk Factory" is the story of four people: Johnny, an...

$27.59  $26.21

Buy Now

The Moor's Last Sigh

The Moor's Last Sigh

What do we do when the world's walls - its family structures, its value-systems, it political forms - crumble? The central character of this novel, 'Moor' Zogoiby, only son of a wealthy, artistic-bohemian Bombay family, finds himself in such a moment of crisis. His mother, a famous painter and an emotional despot, worships beauty, but Moor is ugly, he has a deformed hand. Moor falls in love, with...

$27.59  $26.21

Buy Now

The Outcast

The Outcast

In 1957 Lewis Aldridge, newly released from prison, returns home to Waterford, a suburban town outside London. He is nineteen years old. A decade earlier his father's homecoming at war's end was greeted with far less apprehension by the staid, tightly knit community--thanks to Gilbert Aldridge's easy acceptance of suburban ritual and routine. Nobody is surprised that Gilbert's wife counters...

$27.59  $26.21

Buy Now

The Secret Scripture

The Secret Scripture

Nearing her one-hundredth birthday, Roseanne McNulty faces an uncertain future, as the Roscommon Regional Mental hospital where she's spent the best part of her adult life prepares for closure. Over the weeks leading up to this upheaval, she talks often with her psychiatrist Dr. Grene, and their relationship intensifies and complicates. Told through their respective journals, the story that...

$28.61  $27.19

Buy Now

The Strangest Man: The Hidden Life of Paul Dirac

The Strangest Man: The Hidden Life of Paul Dirac

Paul Dirac was one of the leading pioneers of the greatest revolution in 20th-century science: quantum mechanics. The youngest theoretician ever to win the Nobel Prize for Physics, he was also pathologically reticent, strangely literal-minded and legendarily unable to communicate or empathize. Through his greatest period of productivity, his postcards home contained only remarks about the...

$35.00  $33.25

Buy Now

White Teeth

White Teeth

One of the most talked about fictional debuts of recent years, "White Teeth" is a funny, generous, big-hearted novel, adored by critics and readers alike. Dealing - among many other things - with friendship, love, war, three cultures and three families over three generations, one brown mouse, and the tricky way the past has of coming back and biting you on the ankle, it is a life-affirming,...

$27.55  $26.17

Buy Now