`By Royal Command` shortlisted for Independent Booksellers Book Prize

09-Jun-2009 • Young Bond

Bloomsbury dominates the shortlist for the Independent Booksellers Book Prize with three nominations. Voting for this year's award, along with the prize for best children's book, will begin during Independent Booksellers Week, which takes place from 15th to 22nd June - reports The Bookseller.

Bloomsbury's A Thousand Splendid Suns, The Suspicions of Mr Whicher and The Guernsey Literary and Potato Peel Pie Society are the publisher's three books on the shortlist, which also includes Booker Prize winner The White Tiger (Atlantic) on a shortlist of nine titles.

HarperCollins and Puffin have three books each on the children's shortlist. Puffin's Artemis Fowl and the Time Paradox, By Royal Command and Then will be battling against HarperCollins' The Crossing of Ingo, Skulduggery Pleasant: Playing with Fire and Kaspar, as well as the four other books on the shortlist.

Both shortlists were voted for by Booksellers Association members from a longlist derived from sales data of bestselling books at independent bookshops.

The BA is providing participating indies with point of sale material as well as voting cards from 15th June. Customers can vote using the postcard or by emailing votes@booksellers.org.uk. Voting will run until 28th August and the winners will be announced in September.

More than 200 bookshops have signed up to take part in the week long event. Authors including Kate Adie, Matthew Hoggard, William Fiennes, Jane Fearnley-Whittingstall will be taking part in events at shops across the country.

The adult shortlist:

Child 44 by Tom Rob Smith (Pocket Books)
The Guernsey Literary and Potato Peel Pie Society by Mary Ann Shaffer (Bloomsbury)
Musicophilia by Oliver Sacks (Picador)
The Secret Scripture by Sebastian Barry (Faber)
Somewhere Towards the End by Diana Athill (Granta)
Spilling the Beans by Clarissa Dickson-Wright (Hodder)
The Suspicions of Mr. Whicher by Kate Summerscale (Bloomsbury)
A Thousand Splendid Suns by Khaled Hosseini (Bloomsbury)
When Will There be Good News? by Kate Atkinson (Black Swan)
The White Tiger by Aravind Adiga (Atlantic)

The children's shortlist:

The Crossing of Ingo by Helen Dunmore (HarperCollins)
Running on the Cracks by Julia Donaldson (Egmont)
The Dragonfly Pool by Eva Ibbotson (Macmillan)
Tiddler by Julia Donaldson (Scholastic)
Mr Gum and the Dancing Bear by Andy Stanton (Egmont)
Skulduggery Pleasant: Playing with Fire by Derek Landy (HarperCollins)
Then by Morris Gleitzman (Puffin)
Artemis Fowl and the Time Paradox by Eoin Colfer (Puffin)
By Royal Command by Charlie Higson (Puffin)
Kaspar by Michael Morpurgo (HarperCollins)