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The Costas are considered by many the UK's most prestigious book awards. Established by Whitbread Plc in 1971, they were rebranded the Costa Awards in 2006. Costa is a UK based coffee shop chain owned by Whitbread. The five category winners (First Novel, Novel, Biography, Poetry and Children's Book) are announced in early January, honoring books published the previous year. The Costa Book of the Year Award is announced in late January.
The new year is upon us and with it come many wonderful new books to discover. Here are a dozen books that are publishing in the first three months of 2015. We like them so much we are showcasing each - as a professionally reviewed book, a First Impressions review book, a focus for discussion or a giveaway - and we think you will like them too!
The end of the year is a perfect time to take stock, to reflect on the many great books we made time for and to add many other remarkable recommendations to our ever-expanding "to read" lists.
This is where BookBrowse's annual Best of the Year awards come in. As opposed to most other award programs which encourage vote stuffing and are more an indication of an author's fan base, our best of year winners are chosen on a weighted scale by our members. No vote-stuffing, no simple yes or no vote. These are considered responses; we take our awards program seriously. In this issue, we feature the four overall winners in the Best Fiction, Best Non-Fiction, Best Young Adult, and Best Debut categories; and the runners up. The books are displayed in ratings order - starting with the Top 10 in fiction, followed by the Top 5 in non-fiction and young adult categories.
The dazzling gem, All The Light We Cannot See, wins our Best Book of 2014 in the fiction category; while the gripping adventure story, In the Kingdom of Ice takes it home for best non-fiction. The quirky A Man Called Ove wins best debut while Jandy Nelson's altogether brilliant I'll Give You the Sun wins in the young adult category.
Congratulations to BookBrowse's 2014 Award Winners!
Click on the image to read the review, backstory and excerpt for each book:
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Best Fiction
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Best Debut
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Best Nonfiction
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Best Young Adult
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Next week we'll publish the full list of 2014 BookBrowse Favorites as selected by BookBrowse's members & subscribers
About the awards
Most "people's choice" book awards actively encourage authors and publishers to send their fans to the voting page ("vote stuffing"). Clearly this gives a huge advantage to those authors with the widest fan base. Also, the standard method of voting is to simply cast a yes or no vote for a book - which again gives an advantage to the books with the highest sales. Thus most "people's choice" awards measure popularity, which is not always the same as quality!
BookBrowse's Top Ten Debuts For August 2014
Each year we search through thousands of books and book reviews in order to shortlist the most notable 80-100 publishing each month. Then we gather together all available reviews for each book so our members know about the best and most interesting books well ahead of the crowd.
Here are 10 notable debuts that we think you'll want to know about - all publishing in August.
BookBrowse is a guide to exceptional books. As such, we only feature those that our reviewers hand on heart believe to be best in class. Because the books we select go through a rigorous selection process before we even assign them for review, the majority do make the grade - but some, despite good reviews elsewhere, just don't resonate with our reviewers' and get turned down. In these cases we usually post a short review on the book's page on BookBrowse but do not feature it as a lead book.
