Marlborough LitFest’s Love Books competition, launched in 2020 in association with English at Bath Spa University, marked its fifth year in 2024. Its aim is to celebrate the power of reading to shift perceptions and to open up opportunities. This national competition invites participants to explain their choice of a favourite book, poem or play in a written response of up to 750 words. The emphasis needs to be on what entrants love about their chosen read and why they think others should try it. Entrants are rated on their enthusiasm, creativity and the quality of their writing.
The competition is open to three age groups: 13-15 years, 16-19 years and 20 years and above. We received 107 entries in 2024 drawn from a wide range of reading choices from classics to the latest thrillers. Shortlisted entries were given to our judges – Judy Carver, writer and CEO of William Golding Ltd; Ben Tarring, Observer journalist and former LitFest committee member; and Nicola Presley (Senior Lecturer in English and Literature at Bath Spa and Media & Marketing Officer for William Golding Ltd) – to make their final decision.
13 – 15s WINNER
A Good Girl’s Guide To Murder – Holly Jackson
By Kirsten Thomas
I’ve always loved reading, every time I read a new book I’m like “Oh my gosh I love this, this is definitely my favourite” but then I read another book and I’m like “Ugh, I love this so so much”. Two books, however, have really stuck with me: The Summer I Turned Pretty and A Good Girl’s Guide To Murder, which funny enough both have a tv series for them. Things from A Good Girl’s Guide To Murder (Agggtm for future reference) have definitely stuck in my brain more than The Summer I Turned Pretty.
Agggtm is all the rage at the moment. The series is coming out soon and so you might think that I’m just following a trend, and at first I thought I was. I remember thinking “Oh everyone seems to really love this, let’s read it” then I read it and was blown away. The writing is beyond amazing and honestly above any other I’ve read before.
The person that keeps this plot thickening; a very enthusiastic and academic school girl whose name is Pippa-Fitz Amobi (the protagonist) an A-level student who is working on the closed case of Andie Bell and Sal Singh who were at the time together. Well they never broke up because they both died before they could even try, yikes. Andie Bell goes missing on the 20th of April and a search party is sent out immediately. Being the small town of “little Kilton” missing cases are unusual. Andie’s never found, but evidence is and there isn’t much of it. First off they find that she was meant to be picking her parents up from a party but never arrived and so the first round of evidence comes from family, friends and any immediate contacts. Not much information is found there apart from a significant lead, Sal (Salil) Singh who was at a “calamity party”. He left at 10:30 and returned home at 12:00. Odd. And on the same night his girlfriend went missing. Suspicious… After they learn this fact they find Andie’s car, a black Peugeot.
It has her blood in the boot and on the steering wheel with Sal’s finger prints on it which makes him the obvious killer, right? Well, Pippa doesn’t think so. The police decide to revisit it once they have more backing evidence but don’t have the time to, as the next morning Sal is found dead just outside the woods. An autopsy is preformed; he committed suicide, took a ton of his dad’s insomnia pills, tied a plastic bag around his head and dies of suffocation. I personally don’t think this is suicide, I think it was by another person (maybe the not so dead Andie Bell… just a thought). Pippa, thinking this, indulges in an investigation to close this case once and for all and she does it for her EPQ school project.
I love this book for so many reasons. The no.1 New York Times best seller Agggtm by Holly Jackson has left its mark on me and by the sounds of reviews many others. This is my favourite book for so many reasons. One of them is that the writing style is unmatched; Holly manages to give just the right balance of how Pippa’s feeling through all of this and Ravis (her consulted partner in crime) but she also throws you into the story, which is something I think most people like as a reader. Making you feel like you’re reliving the crimes even though you weren’t there in the first place, she truly takes you back in time to somewhere you’ve never been before. It makes you feel like a detective reading the books like “OMG THIS RELATES TO THAT” and “Ohhh that’s what happened there”. It’s one of the most mesmerising things I’ve ever read. I’m proud of Holly for writing this and I don’t even know her. Once you pick her book up it can’t be put down.
If anyone ever came up to me saying “do you think I should read this” I would 100% say yes, without a doubt. And I mean who would put a note like “Stop digging Pippa” in her sleeping bag. Want to find out who? So do I. Let’s read.
13-15s RUNNER-UP
The Silent Patient – Alex Michaelides
By Eve Jacobs
Anyone who knows me knows that I am not a silent person by any stretch of the word, which led me to pick up The Silent Patient by Alex Michaelides perhaps slightly ironically. However, I am truly so thankful that my friend recommended it to me (thank you, Thea) as it is by far one of the best novels I have read.
Initially, I was not completely taken by the idea of the storyline; a successful woman living with her successful husband in an area of London where successful people live seemed a bit typical, but then she shoots her husband in the head five times. Immediately I was taken aback and consumed by interest and questions. What were her motives? Why such a sudden change of character? What did her husband do? Why does she refuse to speak? Can she even speak? I suppose I have the author to thank for such an intriguing overview, and I will admit that I am partial to a novel recommended by The Sunday Times. So, I started reading.
I will admit that it took me a good few chapters to really get ‘stuck in’ to the novel, but the pace quickly sped up. I grew attached to the piece-by-piece description of the events from the narrator’s perspective, and his detailed accounts of his own chaotic and traumatic childhood. Theo Faber was a remarkably interesting character to me, as he seemed to be inexplicably obsessed with Alicia, the ‘Silent’ woman who murdered her husband but also had a very alarming – and sad – upbringing which made me wonder if he had some connection with her, her husband, or her family?
Part two of the novel was Alicia’s diary. Great! I had thought. Some answers! But unfortunately, I was kept at the edge of my seat. She talks about a heatwave, dinner with her husband, and how they love each other. They seemed strangely normal…
The novel continued to tease details and give hints about the truth, but then seemed to push another truth entirely. I thoroughly enjoyed how deceiving the characters appeared to be but honestly also found them frustrating at times as they were unreliable and were difficult to dissect.
The typical ‘plot twist’ moment shook me. It seemed unbelievable and yet perfectly clear, and somehow changed my entire perception of the novel. As a reader, I value most the ability of a writer to make me think and challenge my views and ideas. This novel certainly did all those things and left me puzzling for days afterwards about what it is about someone that makes them trustworthy or dependable. Some part of me was weirdly hurt as I felt I had been deceived by the narrator, but that is why I found it so engrossing. I think a good book changes the way you understand or receive other people just slightly. This novel taught me to look at every viewpoint and question every motive.
Having finished this read, I spent the next week raving about it to anyone who would listen (my friends can attest to this) and managed to hook a few people onto it. Even my fantasy-romance-loving friend was persuaded to give it a go, and she loved it!
16-19s WINNER
Rebecca – Daphne du Maurier
By Eleanor Harvey
‘Last night I dreamt I went to Manderley again…’ This opening sentence of Daphne du Maurier’s Gothic masterpiece Rebecca is probably one of the most famous lines in literature. Without reading the novel, it is perhaps hard to understand why. However, in just nine words, this sentence encapsulates all the traits which make du Maurier’s story of obsession so compelling and atmospheric.
‘Last night…’
It is certainly appropriate that these are Rebecca’s opening words, given the novel’s preoccupation with the past. The plot centres on the notably unnamed narrator’s obsession with her new husband Maxim de Winter’s notoriously gorgeous and charismatic late wife, Rebecca. A much younger, underconfident and naïve lady’s companion when she first meets and quickly marries Maxim, the narrator cannot escape the feeling that she will never live up to Rebecca’s legacy as the perfect wife who fit so neatly into the upper-class world the narrator is an outsider to. However, this is far from the only shadow the past casts over the characters. Du Maurier begins her novel at a distant future from the main storyline of the narrator’s early relationship with Maxim. Yet, despite this passage of time, du Maurier emphasises that the couple’s life is still entirely dictated by the past; they must live in various foreign hotels due to the fallout of the novel’s later events and never speak about what happened. Rebecca is therefore far from the only (non-literal) phantom haunting the text, with every action the characters take shaping their lives forever – usually for the worst.
‘…I dreamt…’
In telling us the narrator only ‘dreamt’ of Manderley, du Maurier foregrounds how much of the novel occurs in the narrator’s imagination. As readers, we see everything through the second Mrs de Winter’s eyes, and we must make our own judgements on what is real or paranoia. While she initially fantasises about her blissfully happy future with Maxim, her daydreams soon shift to images of Rebecca provoked by the small but insidious reminders of her perfection she finds everywhere. Her life is gradually taken over by a woman who has been rendered angelic by death, but who is in so many ways still living. However, du Maurier does not merely show us the narrator’s fears of inadequacy as she falls ever deeper into her corrosive obsession. Instead, she reels the reader into this same trap, as we constantly attempt to decode the puzzle of Rebecca’s real life. Then, just as we think we are close to understanding, du Maurier turns everything upside down in one of the most memorable plot twists ever committed to page. Only then can we look back on all the hints we misinterpreted and recognise that we should have realised the truth all along.
‘…I went to Manderley again.’
What, then, of the central phrase of du Maurier’s opening sentence? Well, Manderley – Maxim’s famously beautiful home – is arguably the novel’s true protagonist, earning pages of description before Maxim or even Rebecca is mentioned. Even when accepting Maxim’s marriage proposal, the narrator’s first thought is not of love, but of living there. Manderley becomes so much more than a house: it is a symbol of status and acceptance which initially seem so unattainable to the gauche narrator, and increasingly blurs – as everything does – into the narrator’s image of Rebecca. Manderley is Rebecca’s house, full of Rebecca’s things: her dogs, her writing desk, her bedroom – and her husband. It is also the realm of Mrs Danvers, the iconic creepy housekeeper, whose obsession with Rebecca outdoes even the narrator’s own. From du Maurier’s first mention of Mrs Danvers, she sends a chill down our spine through her uncanny ability to see into the narrator’s mind, confirming all her worst fears of inferiority. It is no wonder, then, that Manderley becomes a ghost itself, haunting the narrator’s dreams even when she believes she has escaped her old demons.
Few among us will marry strangely taciturn multimillionaires with famous stately homes and notorious ex-wives, but that doesn’t save us from being pulled into the same traps as our narrator. As we read, we too are haunted yet seduced by the evasive Rebecca, the terrifying Mrs Danvers, and the charismatic but cold Maxim as we try to work out what’s really going on. It is an often unbearably claustrophobic interrogation of love, class, nostalgia, obsession, psychological manipulation, and above all of the past, which we can neither recapture nor truly escape. And the plot twist’s pretty good as well.
16-19s RUNNER-UP
In Memoriam – Alice Winn
By Mia Pitts
At seventeen when you are faced with condensing yourself into a university application, your name tied to numbers and letters of attainment, there is respite in the daydream of being recognised for all the subtleties mere grades could never encapsulate. Love offers itself as the scope through which we may be seen in our entirety.
I am yet to read a more escapist depiction of this magical ability of love than that of Alice Winn’s In Memoriam. Ripped from the smallness of their public boarding school, Gaunt and Ellwood find solace in one another amidst the gruelling reality of World War 1. Their greatest fear is not to be shot by a Fritz, but rather to fall too deeply for one another, when at any moment they may be separated by division or death. The soft intimacy of their affection juxtaposes vivid descriptions of the endless, futile deaths around them; it is perhaps a testament to the power of love that such a beautiful story of connection could possibly exist alongside one of such monstrous conflict.
A Level history has taught me to memorise. Without hesitation I could list the dates of various battles, the contents of letters sent from leader to leader, the figures of lives lost and pounds spent on artillery – yet In Memoriam has taught me to see the stories that lie beneath the statistics. Now when a previously sterile number of casualties appears on the whiteboard at school, I see flickers of life between the digits. The line in my textbook that talks of soldiers enlisting as a result of propaganda spills off the page as Gaunt enlists to escape his terrifying feelings about Ellwood. My notes on the locations of divisional rest pulse with the night they spent together in an abandoned château ‘somewhere in France’. Barren facts become portals to the lives that made them a reality, and it is through this book that I have been reminded of why I chose to study history in the first place.
Alice Winn’s presentation of a homosexual love is delicate. Sometimes rough and shameful, sometimes gentle and earnest – but always unequivocally human. Explaining in an interview how she spoke with her ‘male friends who are gay or bisexual’ to ensure Gaunt and Ellwood’s encounters were relatable, Winn demonstrates what I believe to be a fundamental argument of the topical debate as to whether or not writers should write outside of their own experience: telling a story you have not lived can give way to essential empathy and understanding.
Ellwood reaches to poets such as Tennyson and Shakespeare to make sense of the world of pain and confusion around him. Through this Winn reminds us of the transcendent and extraordinary role of a good writer – somebody to look to when we cannot articulate what we are burning to express. As teenagers today, growing into a world of unprecedented change, we arguably need such writers more than ever; in the same way Ellwood finds hope in one of his Tennyson quotes, we too are free to take from it what we may be searching for:
“Behold, we know not anything;
I can but trust that good shall fall
At Last – far off- at last, to all,
And every winter change to spring.”
20+ WINNER
Diary of a Provincial Lady – E M Delafield
By Kate Diamond
The similarities between myself and the eponymous Lady (unnamed throughout the novel) are, on paper, few and far between. We both have two children. End of list.
She lives in Great Depression era rural Devon, with a household staff, and a tennis court in the garden. Her eldest son attends boarding school on the south coast, and she attends dinner parties featuring distinguished artists and editors. None of these things are true of me.
And yet, no other literary character has so perfectly encapsulated my thoughts on socialising, marriage, raising children, picnics, the press, bananas, the role of aunts and uncles, and the state of my hair. One hundred years after the fact, every mundanity in every diary entry is my own.
We are both buried under the guilty weight of unanswered correspondence – hers letters, mine social media notifications and group chats.
We both have two good dress options that we alternate for social occasions – hers the Blue / Black-and-gold, mine the Blue with pink print / Low cut black.
We share a strong “homicidal impulse” when engaging with certain people who will stop at nothing to deny us a conversational win. Her – Lady B, me – that guy at work.
When agitated with her husband she often visits the divorce court in her mind. And I, well, I used to do that all the time, before I visited the divorce court in real life.
.
We are on a joint quest to achieve “stability of financial situation” – she writes to the bank, moving money between accounts to cover outstanding charges, while I regularly grant myself payday loans from my instant access savings account.
And our daily list of reminders: “Put evening shoes out of window to see if fresh air will remove smell of petrol”, and rhetorical questions: “Could I write a play myself? Could we all write plays, if only we had the time?” remain banished to the annuls of our minds, with little chance of ever being acted upon or answered.
As with any diary, the entries are built on mundanity. But, as with all the best fictional diarists – Cassandra Mortmain, Adrian Mole, Greg Heffley – we love them for their unique take on the every day. Provincial Lady is no exception.
After several weeks of mental negotiations, the pre-emptive undertaking of a host of domestic tasks, and a disastrous vomit-fuelled ferry crossing, she arrives in the South of France to spend a few days in the company of her dear friend Rose, who moves in altogether more glamorous circles.
Our Lady’s efforts to fit in here are a particular highlight, as she attempts to accompany the fanciest of all the holiday guests in swimming to a large rock in the middle of the sea. Having set off, she has the immediate revelation that she is not as strong a swimmer as she thought – “Long before we are half-way there, I know that I shall never reach it, and hope that Robert’s second wife will be kind to the children”.
Her agonisingly slow crawl through the sea towards the rock – contemplating the meaning of life, mentally selecting photographs for the newspaper articles on her death, while being repeatedly dragged underwater – is hysterical. She remains effusively polite throughout her near drowning, and eventually emerges onto the rock, bleeding heavily from the knee and blowing her nose into her hand, with the one aim of retaining what is left of her dignity. In a single page, Delafield has crafted the perfect tale – mild peril, the indignity of being worse than our peers at physical activities, the vanity of the mind (even in death), and the unfailing politeness of the British people.
Provincial Lady is laugh out loud funny, no doubt. But it is only when attempting to emulate her writing do I realise with quite how few words she can convey a thought, feeling or situation. Her ability of genuine comedic brevity is something I long to master.
Nonetheless, while I may not be able to emulate her, it is heartening to know her. In discovering the Provincial Lady, I discovered that my unending internal monologue cataloguing my shortcomings, asking pointless questions, and penning witty retorts hours after awkward exchanges are over, had lived a previous life in Great Depression era rural Devon.
I only wish this book were more widely known, so that more people could enjoy a similar revelation.
20+ RUNNER-UP
Foundation – Isaac Asimov
By Clare Diston
Sometimes a book finds you at just the right time – and sometimes you have to go looking for it.
About 10 years ago, I decided I wanted to read Isaac Asimov’s Foundation. I don’t know where I’d heard about it, or why it was suddenly on my radar; I just knew it was a sci-fi classic and I desperately wanted a copy. For months, I looked in every bookshop I went into, but I couldn’t find it. Then one day, my housemate (who had no idea about my private book quest) came home with a copy, read it, hated it and gave it to me.
That book changed my life.
Foundation tells the story of the downfall of the Galactic Empire. In the far future, humans have settled millions of planets across the galaxy; the Empire has brought relative stability and prosperity to its members, but its time is nearly up. Hari Seldon, inventor of ‘psychohistory’, can predict the future by studying the behaviour of humans en masse. That’s why he knows the end of the Empire is coming, and that it will lead to decay, destruction and thousands of years of darkness for humanity. But he has also laid the foundations (geddit?) for a plan that will shorten the time before the next empire can be established, and thus save billions of lives.
The book is a series of snapshots, set many years apart. In each one, a different cast of characters faces a new crisis that threatens to plunge their planet, or the galaxy, into oblivion. It’ll take wit and cunning to overcome each crisis and set humanity on the path to peace again.
When I came to this book, I’d hardly read any sci-fi before. That’s because I’m an English Literature graduate, and while I loved my degree and will never regret having studied books for three years, the university syllabus had left me with some snobbishness about what ‘good literature’ is. Anything genre – science-fiction, fantasy, horror, romance, crime – had some value, but it was definitely a tier below the good stuff, the classics, the worthy literature. Fantasy could never be literary; science-fiction couldn’t possibly be great.
Foundation so caught my imagination that it opened up not only sci-fi to me, but also all those other books I’d dismissed as not being worthy for so many years. I loved the puzzle-box feel of each mini-story in Foundation: the setting up of the crisis, all hope seeming lost, the clever solution that removes the threat while also setting up for the next one. I loved the smart, know-it-all characters. I especially loved the galaxy-wide scope of the story and the sheer imagination Asimov brings to this world.
Of course, I can’t ignore the book’s problematic aspects: its lionisation of ’empire’ as a concept, or its lack of female characters, for example. These are things that crop up time and again in classic sci-fi, and it’s something you have to reckon with as a reader when you dig into the formative literature of any long-lasting genre. But even though it’s not a perfect book, for me it was a life-changing one.
Letting go of my ‘book snobbery’ and leaning into what I actually enjoy opened up worlds to me. I no longer think that genre fiction is ‘less’ than literary fiction. For a while after Foundation, I read sci-fi as a ‘guilty pleasure’; now it’s just a ‘pleasure’, because there’s no need to feel guilty for enjoying something that’s actually fantastic.
Reading sci-fi also made me want to write it myself, but when I started I quickly realised that I didn’t know enough science to write it convincingly – and so I signed up to study for a degree in Astronomy and Planetary Science. I’m two-thirds of the way through now, and I’ve already pivoted my day job towards being a science editor. I’ve worked on books about Mars and stars and the whole vast universe.
Foundation was my foundation – for a new passion, a new job and a new approach to life. It taught me to embrace what I enjoy and follow my interests wherever they lead.
I recommend that you read Foundation, because it’s a fun, clever space romp. But I also think you should pick up that book you’ve been thinking about reading, the one you’ve been told isn’t worth your time but that calls to you nevertheless.
It might just change your life.
Marlborough LitFest ’24 declared ‘open’
