Best of the Brits

Galaxy National Book Awards have been around for twenty years or so. It’s a televised event (that likens itself to the Oscars) designed to bring attention to the best in British publishing. Individual retailers sponsor the ten categories which range from Biography to Children’s fiction.

The 2009 Galaxy Book of the Year was The Suspicions of Mr. Whicher: a murder and the undoing of a great Victorian detective by Kate Summerscale

“In June of 1860 three-year-old Saville Kent was found at the bottom of an outdoor privy with his throat slit. The crime horrified all England and led to a national obsession with detection, ironically destroying, in the process, the career of perhaps the greatest detective in the land. Inspector Jonathan Whicher’s real legacy, however, lives on in fiction: the tough, quirky, all-knowing and all-seeing detective that we know and love today…from the cryptic Sgt. Cuff in Wilkie Collins’s The Moonstone to Dashiell Hammett’s Sam Spade. The Suspicions of Mr. Whicher reads like the best of Victorian thrillers, and has been nominated for the Samuel Johnson Prize in London.” – publisher