With just one day to go before the Gordon Burn Prize shortlist is announced, I have managed to read ten out of the twelve longlisted titles. Time constraints mean that I haven’t managed to blog about Will Ashon’s Chamber Music – a superb collection of essays, boldly conceived and powerfully executed – or Sarah Moss’s Ghost Wall, which was one of my reading highlights from 2018. I also ran out of time to read Kerry Hudson’s Lowborn – a book I feel I am almost guaranteed to like and admire (contrary though this may seem, this is undoubtedly the reason it kept getting pushed to the back of my reading queue) – and Pat Barker’s The Silence of the Girls, the one book on the longlist whose presence there bemused me.
With these personal shortcomings very much in mind, my prediction for the shortlist is as follows:
The Vogue by Eoin McNamee
For the Good Times by David Keenan
Ghost Wall by Sarah Moss
Sweet Home by Wendy Erskine
Chamber Music by Will Ashon
This Brutal House by Niven Govinden
That being said, there’s an argument to be made for every single one of the titles I’ve read, and I wouldn’t be at all surprised to see a very different shortlist emerging, with very different emphases.
I’m looking forward to finding out which books make it through. In the meantime, I’m also going to reveal my personal choice of winner, which would be Eoin McNamee’s The Vogue. The emotional power of that work, its inalienable sense of place, its stark poetry – even more than Ghost Wall and For the Good Times, my close runners-up, this is a novel that will remain with me for a long time to come.