The Tubridy Show Listeners' Choice Award

IRISH BOOK AWARDS 2009

Ryan & Diarmaid

The Tubridy Show’s hugely popular Listeners’ Choice Award includes The Booker Prize Winner, The Costa Prize winner and the Samuel Johnson Award winner.  Five novels and the tale of an extraordinary Victorian murder mystery compete for your votes.

Previous winners:

2008: Judging Dev Diarmaid Ferriter

2007: The Boy in the Striped Pyjamas John Boyne

2009 Shortlist:

• **WINNER**
  The Secret Scripture
  Sebastian Barry
  (Faber & Faber)
  
  The story of a centenarian and mental hospital patient Roseanne McNulty is at once shockingly and deeply beautiful.  Refracted through the haze of memory and retelling, Roseanne’s story becomes an alternative, secret history of Ireland’s changing character and the story of a life blighted by terrible mistreatment and ignorance.  Winner of the Costa Book of the Year 2008.
• The Private Lives of Pippa Lee
  Rebecca Miller
  (Canongate Books)
  
  Pippa seems to have everything in life.  But suddenly she finds her world beginning to unravel.  Amid the buzzing lawnmowers and suburban coffee mornings, she starts to wonder how she came to be in this place.  Miller’s astute beautifully nuanced novel explores the unpredictable consequences of choosing to live a safe but emotionally compromised life.
• Testimony
  Anita Shreve
  (Little Brown)
  
  At a New England boarding school, a sex scandal is about to break.  Even more shocking than the sexual acts themselves is the fact that they were caught on videotape.  A gripping emotional drama with the pace of a thriller, Testimony details the ways in which lives can be derailed or destroyed in one foolish moment.
• The White Tiger
  Aravind Adiga
  (Atlantic Books)
  
  Meet Balram Halwai, the White Tiger: servant, philosopher, entrepreneur and murderer.  Though born in poverty, Balram dreams of escape.  When a rich village landlord needs a chauffeur, he takes his opportunity and is soon on his way to Delhi where he learns of the new morality at the heart of the new India.  The 2008 Man Booker Prize-winner.
• The Suspicions of Mr Whicher
  Kate Summerscale
  (Bloomsbury)
  
  In 1860 in a quiet Wiltshire village, an unimaginably gruesome murder is committed.  A true story that inspired Wilkie Collins, Dickens and Conan Doyle, this has all the hallmarks of the classic murder mystery – a body, a detective, a country house steeped in secrets.  Kate Summerscale brings the facts behind this notorious case back to vivid, extraordinary life.
• Netherland
  Joseph O’Neill
  (Harper Perennial)
  
  One of the finest 9/11 novels to date, Netherland is a novel of belonging and not belonging, and the uneasy state in between.  It is a novel of a marriage, and of the shallows and depths of male friendship.  With it, Joseph O’Neill has taken the anxieties of our new century and fashioned a work of extraordinary beauty and brilliance.