Irish author Mary Costello is among the 11-strong long-list for this year's Guardian First Book Award. Costello's debut fictional work, the 12-story collection The China Factory has been short-listed for award, along with ten other titles.
The winner will be announced at a ceremony on November 29 and the winning author will receive a £10,000 prize plus an advertising package in The Guardian and The Observer.
Mary Costello is from East Galway, but now lives in Dublin. Her stories have been anthologised and published in New Irish Writing and in The Stinging Fly journal which is also the publisher of her book.
Previous winners include Zadie Smith and Jonathan Safran Foer. Also in competition this year is army veteran Kevin Powers' debut novel, The Yellow Birds, which pivots around the killing of a young American soldier during the Iraq War of 2003- 2004.
Behind the Beautiful Forevers is Katherine Boo's account of her time living in the Annawadi slum, built on rubbish dumps, at the edge of Mumbai airport. Ms Boo was a a guest on Today with Pat Kenny some months ago talking about her book.
Various publishing houses submitted 94 titles for the prize. Judges Ahdaf Soueif, Kate Summerscale, Jeanette Winterson and Guardian deputy editor Katharine Viner, chaired by Guardian Review editor Lisa Allardice gathered a further raft of debut titles for the list.
Stories in Mary Costello's vibrant collection deal with a young gardener who has an unsettling encounter with a suburban housewife. In another story, a wife embarks upon an on-line affair. The title story features a teenage girl who strikes up an unlikely friendship with a lonely bachelor.
Two of the stories from The China Factory will be read by actress Caitríona Ní Mhurchú on the Book On One on RTÉ Radio 1, during the week beginning Monday 22. From Monday to Wednesday, listeners can hear The Sewing Room, in which a retired school-teacher recalls the single event of her youth that changed her life forever. On Thursday and Friday, the chosen story is Things I See, in which a married woman is visited by her younger sister, a cellist.
The China Factory was reviewed in The Guardian by fellow Irish author Anne Enright, who enthused:"It is the accumulation of tiny pleasures . . . that makes The China Factory such a satisfying and accomplished debut. Like Alice Munro, Costello is not afraid of a good car accident, a cancer diagnosis, the arrival on the scene of a roaring madman . . . This is a writer unafraid of the graveside, or the bedside, of filling the space of the story to the brim. "
"Large events happen in small lives – people die, for a start, they fall in and out of love, they have children and affairs," Enight continued. "The slow leaking of love out of a relationship is described in particular and terrible banality, as Costello's characters move about their ordinary rooms.
"There is a kind of immaculate suburban sadness in many of these tales. Her writing has the kind of urgency that the great problems demand – call them themes; they are the kind of problem that make a writer. With a bit of luck, they could keep her at the desk for the rest of her life."
The complete list of nominated Guardian First Books 2012 is as follows:
Fiction
The China Factory by Mary Costello (Stinging Fly Press)
Absolution by Patrick Flanery (Atlantic)
The Art of Fielding by Chad Harbach (Fourth Estate)
Tony Hogan Bought Me an Ice-cream Float Before He Stole My Ma by Kerry Hudson (Chatto & Windus)
The Yellow Birds by Kevin Powers (Sceptre)
The Lifeboat by Charlotte Rogan (Virago)
Non-fiction
Behind the Beautiful Forevers by Katherine Boo (Portobello)
Quiet: The Power of Introverts in a World that Can't Stop Talking by Susan Cain (Viking)
The Origins of Sex by Faramerz Dabhoiwala (Allen Lane)
Sandstorm: Libya in the Time of Revolution by Lindsey Hilsum (Faber)
Readers' choice
Pelt by Sarah Jackson (Bloodaxe), a poetry collection
