Galaxy ® British Book Awards

Read an extract / See author interviews below

JANUARY 2007 SAW the return of Richard & Judy’s hugely popular Book Club on Channel 4. Once again, viewers are invited to read along with the TV Duo as part of an eight week strand. Viewers will then have the chance to vote on this site for their favourite title. The winner receives the coveted Galaxy British Book Awards Best Read nibbie at the Awards ceremony and dinner held at London’s Grosvenor House on the 28th March. As with last year, each of the eight books in the list will be featured on the Richard & Judy Channel 4 programme, starting from Wednesday, January 31
Amanda Ross, Executive Producer said "Our choices each year are based on instinct but we try to include something we know our viewers will enjoy reading and discussing. People don't want books to be discussed in an uptight fashion anymore. I'm delighted with this year's final eight books and am confident that once again there really is something for everyone. Even if people don't like every book we recommend, we're sure they'll get something out of it and see why we chose each book."

Here's this year's shortlist:
The Interpretation of Murder, Jed Rubenfeld, Headline Review
The Girls , Lori Lansens, Virago Press
Restless, William Boyd, Bloomsbury
Love in the Present Tense, Catherine Ryan Hyde, Doubleday
Semi-Detached, Griff Rhys Jones, Penguin
This Book Will Save Your Life, A.M. Homes, Granta
Half of a Yellow Sun, Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie, Fourth Estate
The Testament of Gideon Mack, James Robertson, Hamish Hamilton
And now read what they're all about:

A dazzling literary thriller - the story of Sigmund Freud assisting a Manhattan murder investigation. The Interpretation of Murder is an inventive "tour de force" inspired by Sigmund Freud's 1909 visit to America, accompanied by protege and rival Carl Jung. When a wealthy young debutante is discovered bound, whipped and strangled in a luxurious apartment overlooking the city, and another society beauty narrowly escapes the same fate, the mayor of New York calls upon Freud to use his revolutionary new ideas to help the surviving victim recover her memory of the attack, and solve the crime. But nothing about the attacks - or about the surviving victim, Nora - is quite as it seems. And there are those in very high places determined to stop the truth coming out, and Freud's startling theories taking root on American soil.

See Richard & Judy Book Club interview

The girls, Rose and Ruby Darlen, were both joined at the head (craniopagus twins) in a rural farming community in 1974. Abandoned by their frightened teenage mother, they are adopted by the eccentric nurse who attended their birth, and her husband, a gentle immigrant butcher. The sisters attempt to lead a normal life, but can't help being extraordinary. Now almost thirty, Rose and Ruby are on the verge of becoming the oldest living craniopagus twins in history. Rose has a passion for writing, and The Girls is her version of life as a conjoined twin. Rose and Ruby are attached at the head, but their struggles and triumphs remind us that connection is central to us all.

Feature date: Wednesday, February 7

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During the long, hot summer of 1976, Ruth Gilmartin discovers that her very English mother, Sally is really Eva Delectorskaya, a Russian emigre and one-time spy. In 1939, Eva is a beautiful twenty-eight year old living in Paris. As war breaks out, she is recruited for the British Secret Service by Lucas Romer, a mysterious, patrician Englishman. Under his tutelage, she learns to become the perfect spy, to mask her emotions and trust no one: even those she loves most. Since then, Eva has carefully rebuilt her life - but once a spy, always a spy. And now, she must complete one last assignment. This time, though, Eva can't do it alone: she needs her daughter's help.

Feature date: Wednesday, 14 February

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Mitch is a 25-year-old with commitment issues. Leonard is a five-year-old kid with asthma and vision problems, who captivates everyone he meets. Pearl is Leonard's teenage mother, who's trying to hide a violent secret from her past. Life has given Pearl every reason to mistrust people, but circumstances force her to trust her neighbour Mitch. And one day, a man from Pearl's past arrives to take her away. She knows that if she is to preserve her dignity, she must go with him. With a heart full of agony, Pearl drops Leonard off with Mitch and never returns. Pearl, Leonard and Mitch each have a story to tell. As their lives unfold, profound questions arise about the nature of love and family. How do you go on loving someone who can't be there for you? The answers are heartbreaking, but ultimately triumphant...

Feature date: Wednesday, 21 February

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Griff Rhys Jones recreates his suburban childhood and adolescence in precise and evocative detail; every young trauma, embarrassment and joyous rebellion, hazily-remembered summer afternoons realised into the wild of the woods and forming feral gangs. He relives the freezing bus journeys to school and the impulsive stealing of half-a-crown from Charlie Hume's money box; holidays in the dreary exile of Weston-Super-Mare or outside Butlins at Clacton, longing to be in - images that are fixed in his consciousness, utterly fuzzy at the edges like a Mivvi but even more concentrated at the centre, frozen into a gooey sweet jam of pure recollected emotion. A confident middle child, Griff adored his mother Gwen and father Elwyn - a shy doctor and woodwork fanatic who loathed the tedium of English social ritual but had a penchant for sweeties and ice-cream and was constantly battling with his weight. These two people were the centre of Griff's young world

Feature date: Wednesday, 28 February

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An uplifting story, set in Los Angeles about one man's effort to bring himself back to life. Richard is a modern day everyman; a middle-aged divorcee trading stocks out of his home. He has done such a good job getting his life under control that he needs no one. His life has slowed almost to a standstill, until two incidents conspire to hurl him back into the world. One day, he wakes up with a knotty cramp in his back, which rapidly develops into an all-consuming pain. At the same time, a wide sinkhole appears outside his living room window, threatening the foundations of his house. A vivid novel about compassion and transformation, This Book Will Save Your Life reveals what can happen if you are willing to open up to the world around you.

Feature date: Wednesday, 7 March

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Set in Nigeria during the 1960s, at the time of a vicious civil war in which a million people died and thousands were massacred in cold blood. The three main characters in the novel get swept up in the violence during these turbulent years. One is a young boy from a poor village who is employed at a university lecturer's house. The other is a young middle-class woman, Olanna, who has to confront the reality of the massacre of her relatives. And, the third is a white man, a writer who lives in Nigeria for no clear reason, and who falls in love with Olanna's sister, a remote and enigmatic character. As these people's lives intersect, they have to question their own responses to the unfolding political events.

Set in contemporary Scotland, the novel uses the literary device of a 'discovered' manuscript - the testament of Gideon Mack - which has fallen into the hands of a journalist. A son of the manse, Mack has grown up in an austere and chilly house, dominated by a joyless father. Unable to believe in God, he is far more attracted by the forbidden cartoons on television. Father and son clash fatally one day and it may be guilt which drives Mack to take up a career in the Church. This minister, who doesn't believe in God, the Devil or an afterlife, one day discovers a standing stone in the middle of a wood where previously there had been none. Unsure what to make of this apparition, Mack's life begins to unravel dramatically... To this story Robertson adds a wealth of insight about the mood of post-war Scotland on the brink of the social revolution of the Sixties and dramatises the country's struggle to stay true to its history while swimming within the powerful current of Americanization.