Costa lottery? Prize is a matter of judgment | Letters

In John Crace’s digested week (30 January), he says of the Costa book of the year award that “everyone accepts the judging of this one is … a complete lottery”. I know of nine people who wouldn’t accept it: me and my fellow judges. Unless I was out of the room when the winner was chosen randomly from a set of numbered balls, my recollection of the judges’ meeting last Tuesday is that we spent a lot of time discussing the merits of each of the five books before coming to a collective decision.
Martyn Bedford
Ilkley, West Yorkshire

• I found your advice to letter writers chilling (Open door, 25 January; Letters, 28 January). In a Paper so entranced by the authentic & the artizznal surely the Letter Page should be a haven of Free Speech? A truely original voice relishes the quirks of meaning which can be wrung out of words mis-spelt, mis-punctuated, & in your terms mis-applied. Could you not allow our mangled missives a moment in the Sun without the cold hand of the Style Guide squeezing us into the box marked “Guardian Letters”?
Sheila Reece
Nottingham

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The High Mountains of Portugal by Yann Martel – digested read

‘It’ll take you a long time to reach the mountains, especially walking backwards’

Homeless: Tomas decides to walk. He does so backwards, as he has done ever since his wife Dora and son Gaspar died some years ago. People say that he walks backwards because he is angry with God, but Tomas knows this is not so. He merely chooses to be careful: if he walks backwards, it is far more difficult for someone to follow him. Luckily, no one in Lisbon in 1904 thinks there is anything at all unusual about this, so he is allowed to go about his daily business bumping into things and knocking over old ladies while maintaining his job in the National Museum of Ancient Art.

One day when he was walking backwards, he came across a 17th-century diary belonging to a Father Ulisse, who had been a missionary in São Tomé. “My God,” exclaims Tomas. “I think I have found an artefact that could change the face of Christianity as we know it.” After further research, Tomas discovers the crucifix has been conveniently relocated to a small church in the High Mountains of Portugal. “Oh dear,” says Tomas. “It is going to take a long time to get there walking backwards.”

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Unspeakable by Abbie Rushton – review

‘It’s one of those novels when you promise to put it away and sleep after reading just one more chapter’

Unspeakable tells the tale of a young girl called Megan who hasn’t spoken since her best friend, Hana, was killed 7 months ago. She blames herself entirely for Hana’s death and is too afraid to ever speak for fear of saying what happened the night Hana died.

Then, a girl called Jasmine starts at Megan’s school. Jasmine is bubbly and chatty and never runs out of things to say, despite having her own secrets about her past, Jasmine willingly befriends Megan.

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Interference Pattern by JO Morgan review – bracingly original poetry

The award-winning poet addresses everything from bullies to the big bang in a stimulating new collection

JO Morgan’s new collection requires and rewards repeated attention. Rereading poetry goes with the territory: a poem you do not want to reread is unlikely to be up to much. But this book is especially challenging. Each time you read – like rubbing a brass or watching mist lift or solving a clue – it becomes clearer, more striking, new things come to light. It is a work to be caught in snatches, in flashes, by stealth, as life itself sometimes is. Don’t be put off by the unwelcoming title – Interference Pattern merely hints at its collage of contents. The book reminds me of TS Eliot’s much-quoted line: “Genuine poetry can communicate before it is understood” – words that have inspired much obscure and pointless writing. But this collection carries you, unnerves and stimulates. It absolutely meets Eliot’s requirement that poetry be “genuine”.

Related: Poet JO Morgan arrives 'out of the blue' to take Aldeburgh first poetry collection prize

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Witch & Wizard by James Patterson – review

‘This book had me on the edge of my seat’

Wisty is a fifteen year-old with no regard for rules, whilst White is her eighteen year-old brother suffering with depression as a result of his girlfriend, Celia, mysteriously vanishing.

The two siblings are living their normal lives when one night they are snatched from their homes in the dead of night, accused of having magical powers they didn’t even know they possessed (although their parents did).

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Jumpin’ Jack Flash: David Litvinoff and the Rock’n’Roll Underworld review – mover, shaker, myth-maker…

Keiron Pim’s account of swinging London’s notorious fabulist, a man who befriended rock stars and gangsters, is absorbing and revealing

Who was David Litvinoff? To certain aficionados of London in the 1960s, his is a fabulously enigmatic name who connects discrete worlds that collided to create the seismic social upheavals of that decade. He knew the Krays and the Stones, Lucian Freud and Peter Rachman, Eric Clapton and George Melly, and a whole gallery of aristocrats, rock stars, artists and criminals.

He contributed to the William Hickey gossip column in the Daily Express, was doorman at a Soho clip joint, and was “dialogue adviser” and “technical consultant” on Donald Cammell and Nicolas Roeg’s cult classic Performance, in which Mick Jagger and James Fox trade psychic places as rock god and gangster. But more than anything he was a raconteur, a brilliant storyteller and fabulist who played court jester to the Chelsea set of the 1960s.

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Claire Vaye Watkins: ‘How come nobody’s ever having sex in the apocalypse?’

The author discusses how growing up in the Mojave Desert informed her debut novel’s vision of an arid world – and why she hates dystopian fiction

Claire Vaye Watkins was born in California and brought up in the Mojave desert, Nevada; her debut novel, Gold Fame Citrus, uses this territory as the backdrop for a terrifying vision of a world without water. Watkins is also the author of the award-winning story collection Battleborn.

Gold Fame Citrus imagines a future US south-west enduring permanent drought, and cut off from the rest of the world. Where did the idea come from?
The way I went about writing was by looking to the past. I was born in an area of California called the Owens Valley, and the Owens Valley was the site of what was called the California water wars in the 1920s, which was when the city of Los Angeles built their aqueduct systems because they realised they didn’t have enough water to make this major metropolis happen, and this dream of manifest destiny, the paradise, the Eden of America, come true. So they built this aqueduct system and one of the lakes it drained was Owens Lake, near where I was born.

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