Costa, Bravo!

Last night saw Frances Hardinge's wonderful book, "The Lie Tree" crowned as Costa Book of the Year.  Having faced down the hotly-tipped neo-gothic of  Andrew Murray's "The Loney" alongside works by Kate Atkinson, Andrea Wulf and Don Paterson, this was a triumph not just for a fiercely entertaining, fiercely intelligent book but also for children's and young adult lit as a whole.

The Lie Tree itself has been described by Frances Hardinge herself as "a Victorian Gothic mystery with added paleontology, blasting powder, post-mortem photography and feminism", while I would describe it as a heady mix of E Nesbit, Wilkie Collins, MR James, Arthur Machen and Germaine Greer.  It's a book that deserves to be read by anyone over the age of eight and I really can't recommend it too highly (though I'd recommend the extraordinary "A Face Like Glass", which is packed with more ideas than a symposiumful of string theorists, even more).