Conville & Walsh

We were delighted to see two of our authors appear in BBC Culture Show’s pick of the twelve best new novelists. Both Jim Powell and Stephen Kelman were picked in the show, which celebrated a new generation of literary novelists, and was chosen by a panel of judges.

Both novels were plucked from our unsolicited submissions by our reader, David Llewelyn, who recommended them to Sue and Jo respectively. After that, the agents worked on the manuscripts and sent them out to publishers, who bid competitively for them.

Jim Powell’s Feliks Zhukovski is a man who chose politics over people and ideas over love. His life’s work is a travel guide to the old Eastern bloc; his personal life a series of failures. Unfortunately for Feliks, it’s 1991. Communism has collapsed, East Germany isn’t the economic miracle he wants it to be, and at 61, his travel-writing days are numbered. Feliks makes the shock decision to sell his guide to an American firm, and sets in motion a life-changing chain of events. He will meet a brother he hasn’t seen in fifty years, learn the horrifying truth about the mother he thought abandoned him, and get a second chance with a long-lost love. But after fifty years of misunderstandings and delusions, can he start his life afresh?

From the boulevards of Paris to the ghettos of wartime Poland, via Midwest America and the Berlin Wall, The Breaking of Eggs chronicles the extraordinary journey of a lonely man who discovers it needn’t have been so. As thought-provoking as it is moving, the novel casts an unflinching gaze on the human cost of a century of wars, all told in ‘an unusual narrative voice that was neither inadequate nor self-consciously stylish’ (John Mullan, the Guardian).

Stephen Kelman has attracted attention for his debut novel, Pigeon English, which drew inspiration from Damilola Taylor’s murder in 2000.

Newly arrived from Ghana with his mother and older sister, eleven-year-old Harrison Opoku lives on the ninth floor of a block of flats on a London housing estate. The second best runner in the whole of Year 7, Harri races through his new life in his personalised trainers - the Adidas stripes drawn on with marker pen - blissfully unaware of the very real threat all around him. With equal fascination for the local gang - the Dell Farm Crew - and the pigeon who visits his balcony, Harri absorbs the many strange elements of his new life in England: watching, listening, and learning the tricks of inner-city survival.

But when a boy is knifed to death on the high street and a police appeal for witnesses draws only silence, Harri decides to start a murder investigation of his own. In doing so, he unwittingly endangers the fragile web his mother has spun around her family to try and keep them safe. A story of innocence and experience, hope and harsh reality, Pigeon English is a spellbinding portrayal of a boy balancing on the edge of manhood and of the forces around him that try to shape the way he falls.

The Saturday Telegraph this week reported that ‘Stephen Kelman[] has a powerful story, a pacy plot and engaging characters. It paints a vivid portrait with honesty, sympathy and wit, of a much neglected milieu, and it addresses urgent social questions… Pigeon English is critic proof.’

If you missed The Culture Show, you can watch it again this week on BBC iPlayer.