book notes: insider news

Shalimar the Clown, Salman Rushdie's India-set novel released last year is to be found garnering the same reactions in the early days of 2006. Both he and Nick Hornby were passed over when the judges opted to give the Whitbread Prize for Fiction to Ali Smith's The Accidental. A story of how a 12 year old girl and her family's lives are disrupted when a stranger is met on holiday, is a less conventional choice than usual from the Whitbread judges. Maybe the withdrawal of Whitbread plc led to a rush of blood to their heads, allowing them to shy away from the usual, safer choices. The Whitbread, which usually awards novels with mass-market appeal like Small Island and The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Nighttime, has chosen a far less obvious novel that should bring a bold, unusual work to a greater audience. Deemed the outsider by the press after her win, Village had picked her as the smart choice last month. She is now joined in the competition for the overall Book of the Year Award by Tash Aw's debut The Silk Harmony Factory, Christopher Logue's Cold Call, a poetic reworking of Homer's Iliad and Hillary Spurling's biography, Matisse the Master. These four will compete with Galway's Kate Thompson's The New Policeman, winner of the Best Children's Fiction Prize.

Kate Thompson is no stranger to victory – a three times winner of the Bisto Children's award as well as the 2005 Guardian award has ensured that she is podium-savvy. That said, her victory of the Whitbread Children's fiction prize should make a more meaningful impact on her profile both at home and abroad. A native of Birmingham, she has been living in County Galway for years. The Whitbread is an equal opportunities prize where the winner of the Best Fiction prize will always be favourite but the winner of each category has just as good a chance of walking away with the overall prize. This decade it was won by Philip Pullman's Amber Spyglass. Thompson's book may bring Irish mythology to a wider audience; The New Policeman is set in her own town of Kinvara whose population are faced with a huge problem when time starts leaking into Tír na nÓg. As is usually the way with winners, Thompson proved herself to be an all round over-achiever on her appearance on last weeks Pat Kenny show. She has a degree in classical fiddle playing, has been a horse trainer in the US and lays claim to being the first yoga teacher in the West of Ireland. The Whitbread will announce if she is the overall winner on 24 January .

iBooks

We spent last year following Google and Microsoft's endeavours to digitise the libraries of the world and already in 2006 we find ourselves trailing beneath the technology bell curve. Sony has released its latest invention, Libre, to the Japanese market and despite lukewarm reception, is set to foist it upon Europe and the rest of the World in 2006. A Libre is an e-Book reader which allows the user to download books and read them anywhere. It has long-lasting battery power and extremely clear digitisation using PDF-like technology. You only need to remember how quickly Apple persuaded the world that they needed iPods – as if no-one had ever owned a Walkman. If Libre takes off, it will certainly make heavy school bags and excess holiday-book weight a thing of the past. Sony plans a download store like iTunes to sell you the words. Book Notes reckons the future is here, again.

A journalist's greatest fear is of getting a story wrong; a close second is public exposure of poor spelling, ill punctuation and repetitive phrasing. Now that Lynne Banks has opened the gates to punctuation perfection with Eats, Shoots and Leaves, life is a whole lot less comfortable. When your family buys you dictionaries and lexicons for Christmas, well, you can imagine the self-doubt beginning to crystalise. Jim O'Donnell's Wordgloss, repackaged and extended since its original 1981 release, stared accusingly from under Book Notes' tree this Christmas. As described in John Banville's forward, the book "set(s) out to recuperate for us the range of classical reference that our education no longer gives us". It compiles an extensive but erratically chosen lists of words often misused or misunderstood. These are then cross referenced, with O'Donnell explaining each word used in every definition as he proceeds. It gives the book a novel charm, allowing the reader to dip in and out at random rather than use it solely as a reference tool. It dwells on etymological tales, explaining the classical origins lost to those who never studied Greek or Latin. Book Notes is recovering from the perceived snub in receiving this fascinating book and is happy to know that 'sycophant' comes from a Greek farmer who informs on a neighbour who is selling figs. Wordgloss will give you this and much more.