Bollinger Everyman Wodehouse Prize for Comic Fiction Shortlist 2024
The Bollinger Everyman Wodehouse Prize for Comic Fiction has announced its shortlist for this year’s award. The seven novels on this year’s list “highlight the funniest novels of the past twelve months, which best evoke the Wodehouse spirit of witty characters and perfectly timed comic prose”.
Bollinger Everyman Wodehouse Prize for Comic Fiction Shortlist 2024
The Bollinger Everyman Wodehouse Prize for Comic Fiction has announced its shortlist of seven titles in contention for this year’s award. Novels by Dolly Alderton, Kaliane Bradley and David Nicholls are among the seven “wickedly funny” books that have been shortlisted for the prize. The books on this year’s list highlight the funniest novels of the past twelve months, which best evoke the Wodehouse spirit of witty characters and perfectly timed comic prose. The award is the UK’s longest running prize for comic fiction.
The 2024 Judging panel consists of Peter Florence, director of The Conversation at St Martin-in-the-Fields, comedians Pippa Evans and Sindhu Vee, author James Naughtie, Justin Albert and Everyman’s Library publisher David Campbell. The shortlist was selected from 89 submissions, published between 1 June 2023 and 31 May 2024.
Chair of the judges, Peter Florence, observed: “The joy of this shortlist is the sheer variety of comedy in play. There are some wickedly funny concepts here, and some beautiful observational humour as characters fall through love and anxiety. In the 24 years of this prize, there have been so many different ways that books have made us laugh out loud. Here we’ve got jokes, farce, satire, spiced wit and wry humour. Maybe the one thing all our writers have in common this year is that in every one of these novels there are sentences, paragraphs and chapters that make you beam with pleasure.”
The Shortlist
Glorious Exploits by Ferdia Lennon
It’s 412 BC, and Athens’ invasion of Sicily has failed catastrophically. Thousands of Athenian soldiers are held captive in the quarries of Syracuse, starving, dejected, and hanging on by the slimmest of threads.
Lampo and Gelon are local potters, young men with no work and barely two obols to rub together. When they take to visiting the nearby quarry, they discover prisoners who will, in desperation, recite lines from the plays of Euripides for scraps of bread and a scattering of olives.
And so an idea is born: the men will put on Medea in the quarry. A proper performance to be sung of down the ages. Because after all, you can hate the Athenians for invading your territory, but still love their poetry.
But as the audacity of their enterprise dawns on them, it becomes increasingly difficult to distinguish between enemies and friends. As the performance draws near, the men will find their courage tested in ways they could never have imagined …
High Vaultage by Chris Sugden and Jen Sugden
EVEN GREATER LONDON, 1887: a vast, uninterrupted urban plane encompassing the entire lower half of England and, for complex reasons, only the upper third of the Isle of Wight… The immense Tower casts electricity across the sky itself, powering the mind-boggling mechanisms of the city below; the notorious engineer-army swarms through its very veins, building, demolishing, and rebuilding whatever they see fit; and – at the heart of it all – sits the country’s first ever private detective agency.
Archibald Fleet and Clara Entwhistle hoped things would pick up quickly for their new enterprise. No one is taking them seriously, but their break will come soon. Definitely… Probably.
Meanwhile, police are baffled by a series of impossible bank robberies, their resources wholly absorbed by the case. Which means that when a woman witnesses a kidnapping, Fleet-Entwhistle Private Investigations is the only place she can turn for help. Luckily they’re more than happy to oblige.
But what’s the motive behind the kidnap? As Clara and Fleet investigate, they find more than they could ever have imagined…
You Are Here by David Nicholls
Marnie is stuck.
Stuck working alone in her London flat, stuck battling the long afternoons and a life that increasingly feels like it’s passing her by.
Michael is coming undone.
Reeling from his wife’s departure, increasingly reclusive, taking himself on long, solitary walks across the moors and fells.
When a persistent mutual friend and some very English weather conspire to bring them together, Marnie and Michael suddenly find themselves alone on the most epic of walks and on the precipice of a new friendship.
But can it survive the journey?
The Ministry of Time by Kaliane Bradley
A boy meets a girl. The past meets the future. A finger meets a trigger. The beginning meets the end. England is forever. England must fall.
In the near future, a disaffected civil servant is offered a lucrative job in a mysterious new government ministry gathering ‘expats’ from across history to test the limits of time-travel.
Her role is to work as a ‘bridge’: living with, assisting and monitoring the expat known as ‘1847’ – Commander Graham Gore. As far as history is concerned, Commander Gore died on Sir John Franklin’s doomed expedition to the Arctic, so he’s a little disoriented to find himself alive and surrounded by outlandish concepts such as ‘washing machine’, ‘Spotify’ and ‘the collapse of the British Empire’. With an appetite for discovery and a seven-a-day cigarette habit, he soon adjusts; and during a long, sultry summer he and his bridge move from awkwardness to genuine friendship, to something more.
But as the true shape of the project that brought them together begins to emerge, Gore and the bridge are forced to confront their past choices and imagined futures. Can love triumph over the structures and histories that have shaped them? And how do you defy history when history is living in your house?
The Rachel Incident by Caroline O’Donoghue
Rachel is a student working at a bookstore when she meets James, and it’s love at first sight. Effervescent and insistently heterosexual, James soon invites Rachel to be his roommate and the two begin a friendship that changes the course of both their lives forever. Together, they run riot through the streets of Cork city, trying to maintain a bohemian existence while the threat of the financial crash looms before them.
When Rachel falls in love with her married professor, Dr. Fred Byrne, James helps her devise a reading at their local bookstore, with the goal that she might seduce him afterwards. But Fred has other desires. So begins a series of secrets and compromises that intertwine the fates of James, Rachel, Fred, and Fred’s glamorous, well-connected, bourgeois wife
Good Material by Dolly Alderton
Every relationship has one beginning. This one has two endings.
Andy loves Jen. Jen loved Andy. And he can’t work out why she stopped.
Now he is. . . 1. Without a home 2. Waiting for his stand-up career to take off 3. Wondering why everyone else around him seems to have grown up while he wasn’t looking.
Set adrift on the sea of heartbreak at a time when everything he thought he knew about women, and flat-sharing, and his friendships has transformed beyond recognition, Andy clings to the idea of solving the puzzle of their broken relationship. Because if he can find the answer to that, then maybe Jen can find her way back to him.
Andy still has a lot to learn, not least his ex-girlfriend’s side of the story.
A Beginner’s Guide to Breaking and Entering by Andrew Hunter Murray
Property might be theft. But the housing market is murder.
My name is Al. I live in wealthy people’s second homes while their real owners are away.
I don’t rob them, I don’t damage anything… I’m more an unofficial house-sitter than an actual criminal.
Life is good.
Or it was – until last night, when my friends and I broke into the wrong place, on the wrong day, and someone wound up dead.
And now… now we’re in a great deal of trouble.
Previous winners of the award include Christopher Brookmyre, Percival Everett and Ian McEwan. In 2023 comedian Bob Mortimer won the prize for his hilarious debut novel The Satsuma Complex.
The winner will be announced at a reception on 2nd December in London. They will receive Bollinger champagne, the complete set of the Everyman’s Library P.G. Wodehouse collection and a pig named after their winning book!
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