Jeffrey Ford, one of my favorite authors here at Harper, won two World Fantasy Awards at this past weekend’s World Fantasy Convention. The Shadow Year won for Best Novel and The Drowned Life won for Best Collection.
The Shadow Year is a terrific coming of age story set in Long island, NY in the 1970s. It’s quirky, edgy and humorous with just enough fantasy thrown in to keep you turning the pages (I’m not the audience for fantasy fiction and I absolutely loved this book.) The Shadow Year received a starred Kirkusreview (”Properly creepy, but from time to time deliciously funny and heart-breakingly poignant, too...this is not to be missed,”) and Booklist hailed it as “[s]urreal, unsettling, and more than a little weird. Ford has a rare gift for evoking mood with just a few well-chosen words and for creating living, breathing characters with only a few lines of dialogue.”
If you haven’t read Mr. Ford yet, do yourself a favor, start! In fact, send an email to me at librarylovefest dot harpercollins dot com and I’ll send you a copy of The Shadow Year. All I ask in return is a brief review of the book!
Check out my interview with Jeffrey Ford on Blog Talk Radio which aired February 2009.
Congratulations, Jeffrey Ford!
For more information, including a complete list of winning titles, please visit: http://www.worldfantasy.org/awards/
-Virginia
