A BOOK FOR ALL AND NONE shortlisted by the Authors’ Club

Clare Morgan wonderful debut A BOOK FOR ALL AND NONE has been shortlisted for the Authors’ Club Best First Novel Award. It is a beautiful, passionate, ambitious and highly unusual novel that cannot be summed up in a few sentences. Friedrich Nietzsche makes an appearance, as does Virginia Woolf, and somewhere along the line an unexpected link between the two emerges. However, it would be absurdly reductive to say that that’s all it is about. There is the present and the past, there is friendship and love in their various guises, there is history, religion, philosophy, madness, death, grief, there even is Iraq. Every single strand is fascinating and fully formed, and yet Clare Morgan somehow manages to weave them all together into a dazzling, thought-provoking whole.

The awards is given by the Authors' Club to the most promising first novel of the year, written by a British author and published in the UK during the calendar year preceding the year in which the award is presented. Past winners include Alan Sillitoe, Jacky Kay, Nadeem Aslam, Laura Beatty and Anthony Quinn.