Shortlist 2009
The shortlist for the 2009 Book Prize can be found below. Chair of the judging panel, comedian Jo Brand, described the list as "incredibly broad, exciting and wide-ranging".
Fiction
Intuition
Allegra Goodman
Sandy Glass is a charismatic publicity-seeking doctor. Marion Mendelssohn is an idealistic and rigorous scientist. They are co-directors of a cancer research lab in Boston. As mentors and supervisors to their young protégés, they demand dedication and respect in a competitive environment where funding is scarce and results elusive. So when the experiments of Cliff Bannaker, one of the youngest members of their team, begin to produce encouraging results, suggesting the very real possibility of a major breakthrough, the entire lab becomes giddy with newfound expectation.
But jealousy soon breeds suspicion and Cliff's colleague - and girlfriend - Robin Decker begins to suspect the unthinkable: that his findings are fraudulent. As Robin makes her private doubts public and Cliff maintains his innocence, a life-changing controversy engulfs the lab and everyone in it?
Allegra Goodman's 'Intuition' explores workplace intrigue, scientific ardour and the moral consequences of a rush judgement. The result is a novel as revealing about human nature as it is about the real life of science.
Publisher: Atlantic Books
Three Letter Plague: A young man's journey through a great epidemic
Jonny Steinberg
A grassroots account of HIV and AIDS in South Africa through the story of a young man, Sizwe Magadla, who runs a shop in a village in Lusikisiki, a district in Eastern Cape. What he discovers explains a modern-day tragedy, why the African AIDS epidemic will continue to spread, even with retroviral drugs and health education freely available.
Steinberg encounters firsthand the firmly-held suspicions which prevent South Africans, especially young men, from getting tested; that AIDS was brought by the white man and is being spread by the needle of doctors; that HIV isn't spread through sexual intercourse (a view publicly endorsed by South African President Thabo Mbeki); that AIDS is brought into the body by demons as punishment; that antiretroviral drugs are useless in the face of witchcraft; even that AIDS was spread through HIV-injected blood oranges.
He meets a relative handful of unforgettable medical professionals - Hermann Reuter, MaMarrandi, over-worked nurses in village clinics swamped by the sheer numbers of those needing treatment - struggling against the continual tide of misinformation. The rumour mill is fed by gossip and the parallel culture of divine-healers and herbalists; spirits and magic.
Publisher: Random House - Vintage
Cutting for Stone
Abraham Verghese
Marion and Shiva Stone are twin sons of a secret union between an Indian nun and a British surgeon at 'Missing' hospital in Addis Ababa. Orphaned by their mother's death in childbirth and their father's disappearance, bound together by a preternatural connection and a shared fascination with medicine, the brothers come of age as Ethiopia hovers on the brink of revolution. Yet it will be love, not politics - their passion for the same woman - that tears them apart and forces Marion to flee his homeland. He makes his way to America, finding refuge in his work as a surgical intern at an underfunded, overcrowded hospital. When the past catches up with him, Marion must trust his life to the two men he thought he trusted least in the world: the surgeon father who abandoned him, and the brother who betrayed him.
Publisher: Random House - Chatto & Windus
Non-fiction
Illness: The art of living
Havi Carel
Havi Carel is a philosopher, lecturer and writer. She is also one of only 120 women in the UK to suffer from the potentially life-threatening illness, lymphangio-leiomyomatosis (LAM), a rare lung disease. On diagnosis, in 2006, Havi was told that life expectancy was approximately ten years. Since then, her life has changed beyond recognition and yet, at the same time, has remained the same. Despite being young and healthy looking, she has had to reinvent her life, rethink her aspirations and plans and, more than anything, learn to love the life she has.
While 'Illness', a unique and often moving book, is founded on Havi's experience of living with a degenerative illness, it was her training as a philosopher that pushed her to reflect more generally on the nature of health and illness. Havi explores illness by weaving together the personal story of her own illness with the insights drawn from her work as a philosopher.
Too often illness is viewed as a localised biological dysfunction while ignoring the actual experience of the ill person, her fears, her hopes, the way she interacts with others and, ultimately, experiences life. This neglected dimension is the focus of this book. Havi shows how illness is a life-changing process rather than a limited physiological problem.
Publisher: Acumen Publishing
Tormented Hope: Nine hypochondriac lives
Brian Dillon
'Tormented Hope' is a book about mind and body, fear and hope, illness and imagination. It explores, in the stories of nine individuals, the relationship between mind and body as it is mediated by the experience, or simply the terror, of being ill. And in an intimate investigation of those nine lives, it shows how the mind can make a prison of the body, by distorting our sense of ourselves as physical beings.
Healthy or unhealthy, robust or failing, ignored or obsessed over, our bodies respond daily to our shifting state of mind, whether we are aware of the process or not. This book is about an especially dramatic instance of that relationship: the mind's invention of physical disease.
Through his witty, entertaining and often moving examinations of the lives of nine subjects - James Boswell, Charlotte Brontë, Charles Darwin, Florence Nightingale, Daniel Paul Schreber, Alice James, Marcel Proust, Glenn Gould and Andy Warhol - Brian Dillon brilliantly unravels the tortuous connections between real and imagined illness, irrational fear and rational concern, anxiety and imagination, the mind?s aches and the body's ideas.
Publisher: Penguin Ireland
Keeper: Living with Nancy - a journey into Alzheimer's
Andrea Gillies
Andrea Gillies made the decision to take on the full-time care of her mother-in-law, Nancy, an Alzheimer's sufferer. With her family, she moved to a remote peninsula in northern Scotland to a house with space to accommodate Nancy and her elderly husband, and there embarked on an extraordinary journey.
'Keeper' describes the emotional strain of living with Alzheimer?s, the trials faced by both sufferer and carer, when patience and obligations are pushed to the limit. The book is also a brilliantly illuminating examination of the disease itself. It explores the brain and consciousness, and tackles profound questions about the self, the soul and how memory informs who we are.
Publisher: Short Books