http://books.guardian.co.uk/whitbread2005/story/0,16517,1677548,00.html The winning books: Novel: The Accidental by Ali Smith (Hamish Hamilton) About Astrid, 12, is stuck in a boring Norfolk holiday home with her boring mother Eve, stepfather, Michael, and elder brother, Magnus. In desperation, she begins videoing the dawn. Then a woman arrives in a broken-down car and life livens up, socially and sexually. What they say The Guardian: A skilful exercise in free indirect style: the characters are not first-person narrators, but lovingly distinguished third-person points of view. First novel: The Harmony Silk Factory by Tash Aw (Fourth Estate) About Four people in Malaysia, with the rumblings of the second world war in the background and the Japanese about to invade. The factory is a shop used as a front for illegal businesses. They say Guardian: Like a bolt of raw silk, Tash Aw's debut can be a little rough and transparent in places. But perhaps one ought to accept the inconsistencies as integral to the effect. Biography: Matisse the Master by Hilary Spurling (Hamish Hamilton) About The painter as he saw himself, with unprecedented and unrestricted access to his voluminous family correspondence, and other new material in private archives. They say Guardian: Since Spurling tells more of the life than of the art, we learn of life's tormenting anxieties but little of what Matisse felt in the creation of art. Poetry: Cold Calls by Christopher Logue (Faber) About Continues from a point nine years after the Greeks have launched 1,000 ships to capture Helen of Troy. They say Guardian: Achilles delivers a speech that is overwhelming in its icy clarity and mercilessness: "Do I hate him? Yes, I hate him. Hate him./And should he be afraid of me? He should./I want to harm him. I want him to feel pain." This is remarkable stuff. We have swerved away from bitter comedy and back into the central drama of the poem. Children's book: The New Policeman by Kate Thompson (Bodley Head) About To save Kinvara from running out of time, J makes the transition to Tir na n'Og, the land of eternal youth, where he finds that the fairy people are also having a problem. They say Guardian: There is something hallucinatory, if not delirious, about this stylish, magical book, the sensation of tenuous recognition, of watching a dream slip away after waking. --

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