COLM TÓIBÍN'S sixth novel, Brooklyn, has been announced as the winner of the Costa Fiction Award.
Tóibín, who receives £30,000 (€33,491), defeated the 2009 Man Booker winner Hilary Mantel and her popular and populist novel Wolf Hall. He has also emulated his countryman Sebastian Barry, who won last year en route to winning the overall Costa Book of the Year. The result confirms a pattern by which Costa, formerly the Whitbread, revises the Booker.
Surprisingly, however, the most contentious Booker shortlist omission, William Trevor's Love and Summer, did not featured on the Costa shortlist.
The ordinary life of an ordinary Irish woman, her dreams and desires, outlined with Tóibín’s characteristic deliberation, upstaged Mantel’s flamboyant recreation of Tudor England and the career of Thomas Cromwell. These are two very different novels by very different writers.
Tóibín’s narrative not only celebrates his own art, it bows to the Irish novel as crafted by Brian Moore and summons the quality of intimacy mastered by John McGahern and, of course, Trevor. Above all it is evocative social history.
Brooklynwas well reviewed and also featured strongly in many of the year's literary round-ups – as did Wolf Hall. It is also interesting that Tóibín held off the additional challenge of 1987 Booker winner Penelope Lively, whose Costa-shortlisted novel Family Albumhas a popular appeal.
The Costa First Novel Award was won by Raphael Selbourne's Beauty, a surprise choice. Also shortlisted was Tóibín's fellow Wexford man, journalist Peter Murphy with John the Revelator.
Many critics considered poet Adam Foulds's Booker-shortlisted The Quickening Maze, based on the tragic life of poet John Clare, as the most impressive British debut of the year, but it was not even shortlisted.
For poet Christopher Reid, it was third time lucky, if with a poignant element. Twice shortlisted previously for the Whitbread Poetry Award, he won with A Scattering, a collection shaped by his wife's death.
This award had seemed destined for Ruth Padel with her Darwin: A Life in Poems, well-timed for the 200th anniversary of the birth of her ancestor, the pioneering natural scientist Charles Darwin.
The biography category has been won by a debut biographer, Graham Farmelo, for The Strangest Man: The Hidden Life of Paul Dirac, Quantum Genius. Dirac was a Nobel-winning British physicist.
Something of a specialist book, it won ahead of William Fiennes's The Music Room, a memoir of a family illness; several literary biographies, most notably David Nokes's outstanding account of the life of Samuel Johnson, were not even shortlisted.
There were no surprises in the Children's Fiction section in which Patrick Ness, as expected, won with The Ask and the Answer, the second instalment of the Chaos Walking trilogy.
The Costa Book of the Year will be announced on January 26th, with Tóibín looking the favourite for a prize which has been won by five novels, including one first novel, since 2003.
Ness could be a dark horse; a children's book has won only once, in 2001, when Philip Pullman triumphed with The Amber Spyglass, the concluding volume of the His Dark Materials trilogy.
