The British Fantasy Awards are presented each year at Fantasycon. The awards are by a ballot of the BFS membership, if you are new to the genre the winners could be viewed as a recommended reading list. Listed on these pages are the winners of the Best Novel by year, for a listing of past award winners in all categories, please click here.
Author:Tim Lebbon
Title: Dusk,
Published by: Spectra Books
Long after the Cataclysmic War that devastated the world and banished magic, the Mages are trying to ensure that the magic, if it returns, is under their control. When farm boy Rafe Baburn shows signs of magical gifts, the Mages send their relentless minions, the Red Monks, in pursuit. Rafe must flee for his life, but fortunately he finds allies in a thief, a woman warrior and a scholarly witch. Many of the well-handled action scenes are from the bad guys' point-of-view, an unusual perspective that helps round out the author's fantasy world. The climactic battle, a variation on the classic raising of the dead, offers an ambiguous outcome that presumably will be resolved in the sequel.
Author: Neil Gaiman
Title: Anansi Boys,
Published by: Headline
When Fat Charlie's dad named something, it stuck. Like calling Fat Charlie “Fat Charlie”. Even now, twenty years later, Charlie Nancy can't shake that name, one of the many embarrassing “gifts” his father bestowed - before he dropped dead on a karaoke stage and ruined Fat Charlie's life.
Mr Nancy left Fat Charlie things. Things like the tall, good-looking stranger who appears on Charlie's doorstep, who appears to be the brother he never knew. A brother as different from Charlie as night from day, a brother who's going to show Charlie howto lighten up and have a little fun ... just like Dear Old Dad.And all of a sudden, life starts getting very interesting for Fat Charlie.
Because, you see, Charlie's dad wasn't just any dad. He was Anansi, a trickster god, the spider god. Anansi is the spirit of rebellion, able to overturn the social order, create wealth out of thin air, and baffle the devil. Some said he could even cheat Death himself.
Author:Stephen King
Title: Dark Tower VII: The Dark Tower
Published by: Donald M. Grant/Scribner
The tension in the Dark Tower series has built steadily from the beginning and, like in the best of King's novels, explodes into a violent, heart-tugging climax as Roland and his ka-tet finally near their goal. The body count in The Dark Tower is high. The gunslingers come out shooting and face a host of enemies, including low men, mutants, vampires, Roland's hideous quasi-offspring Mordred, and the fearsome Crimson King himself. King pushes the gross-out factor at times--Roland's lesson on tanning (no, not sun tanning) is brutal--but the magic of the series remains strong and readers will feel the pull of the Tower as strongly as ever as the story draws to a close. During this sentimental journey, King ties up loose ends left hanging from the 15 non-series novels and stories that are deeply entwined in the fabric of Mid-World through characters like Randall Flagg (The Stand and others) or Father Callahan (Salem's Lot).
Author: Christopher Fowler
Title: Full Dark House
Publisher: Doubleday
Bombs from the Blitz echo in an incendiary blast that takes the life of an octogenarian detective in 21st-century London: a compelling kickoff to a new series. Detective Arthur Bryant has worked with Detective John May in the Peculiar Crimes Unit since 1940, when the two confronted their first peculiar crime together: At the historical Palace Theatre, a dancer in a sensational opera was poisoned and lost her feet. The regular police took one look at the dancer's Austrian connections, the producer's Greek background, and the potential effect on wartime London's morals and morale and immediately passed the case to the newly formed PCU. Bryant, an eccentric, brilliant thinker, saw mythological connections; May chased phantoms on motorcycles through the blackout. Bryant, now an old man, decides to write his memoirs, beginning, as May discovers while sorting through the wreckage of the blast that killed Bryant, with the Palace case. Did someone care enough about a 60-year-old mystery to stop Bryant forcibly? An architectural rendering of the Palace, preserved because absent-minded Bryant left it in a copying machine, provides a clue for May as he resolves the old crime once more and the new crime once and for all. Bryant and May's enduring partnership combines newfangled forensic science with old-fashioned occultism, imagination with derring-do, and a sense of mission with the devastating effects of chaos
Author: China Miéville
Title: The Scar
Published By: Macmillan
In this stand-alone novel set in the same monster-haunted universe as last year's much-praised Perdido Street Station, British author Mieville, one of the most talented new writers in the field, takes us on a gripping hunt to capture a magical sea-creature so large that it could snack on Moby Dick, and that's just for starters. Armada, a floating city made up of the hulls of thousands of captured vessels, travels slowly across the world of Bas-Lag, sending out its pirate ships to prey on the unwary, gradually assembling the supplies and captive personnel it needs to create a stupendous work of dark magic. Bellis Coldwine, an embittered, lonely woman, exiled from the great city of New Crobuzon, is merely one of a host of people accidentally trapped in Armada's far-flung net, but she soon finds herself playing a vital role in the byzantine plans of the city's half-mad rulers. The author creates a marvelously detailed floating civilization filled with dark, eccentric characters worthy of Mervyn Peake or Charles Dickens, including the aptly named Coldwine, a translator who has devoted much of her life to dead languages; Uther Doul, the superhuman soldier/scholar who refuses to do anything more than follow orders; and Silas Fennec, the secret agent whose perverse magic has made him something more and less than human. Together they sail through treacherous, magic-ridden seas, on a quest for the Scar, a place where reality mutates and all things become possible.
Author: Simon Clark
Title: Night of The Triffids
Published by: Hodder & Stoughton
A quarter of a century after an invasion by the deadly alien plants known as triffids blinded most of the world's human population and caused the collapse of civilization, only a small colony of survivors on the Isle of Wight continues to preserve what they can of society and culture. When a new phenomenon arises, resulting in the darkening of the atmosphere, pilot David Masen, the son of the colony's founder, sets out to discover the source of the problem-and encounters a new group of technologically advanced survivors from across the Atlantic. Continuing the classic tale of alien invasion begun 25 years ago in John Wyndham's The Day of the Triffids, Clark envisions a world poised to fight back against their invaders.
Author: China Miéville
Title: Perdido Street Station
Published By: Macmillan
The eccentric scientist Isaac Dan der Grimnebulin is hired to restore the power of flight to a cruelly de-winged birdman. Isaac's secret lover is Lin, an artist of the khepri, a humano-insectoid race; theirs is a forbidden relationship. Lin is hired (rather against her will) by a mysterious crime boss to capture his horrifying likeness in the unique khepri art form. Isaac's quest for flying things to study leads to verification of his controversial unified theory of the strange sciences of his world. It also brings him an odd, unknown grub stolen from a secret government experiment so perilous it is sold to a ruthless drug lord--the same crime boss who hired Lin. The grub emerges from its cocoon, becomes an extraordinarily dangerous monster, and escapes Isaac's lab to ravage New Crobuzon, even as his discovery becomes known to a hidden, powerful, and sinister intelligence. Lin disappears and Isaac finds himself pursued by the monster, the drug lord, the government and armies of New Crobuzon, and other, more bizarre factions, not all confined to his world.
Author: Graham Joyce
Title: Indigo
Published by:Penguin Books (UK),
It is a color the human eye can never truly see, a slice of the spectrum imbued with the promise of invisibility. But in the dark world occupied by Jack Chambers' father, indigo will also lead to places of unknown treachery, and ultimately, to madness.
When Jack Chambers receives news of his father's death, he does not feel grief. He has not seen him for fifteen years. He is surprised, however, to learn of his appointment as executor of the will --a duty that seems simple, but turns ominous...
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