It's done. After five hundred and forty entries, more reading and re-reading than I can account for, and a great deal of heated debate, we have our final ten. These are the openings our judges have chosen to carry through to the last stage of the Marlowe & Christie Novel Prize. Reaching this point, out of a field this large and this genuinely strong, is no small thing, and I want to say clearly that the standard across the whole competition this year has been extraordinary. If you were commended or highly commended and aren't on this list, that is not a verdict on your book. The line had to fall somewhere, and it fell among work I'd happily have championed either side of it. The final ten (in no particular order): 🔟 The Break-up Artist 🔟 A Murder of Crows 🔟 Sea of Clouds 🔟 Flotsam 🔟 Pigeons 🔟 The Dog That Didn't Bark 🔟 Crooked Little Smile 🔟 All That Has Wings 🔟 Nonsuch Island 🔟 Rathaus Here's what happens now. These ten go forward together, anonymously, judged on the writing alone, to be read by four people from the publishing world. The winners will be chosen from this stage. They are: 📚 Alec Shane — a literary agent at Writers House in New York, one of the largest and most established agencies in the world, representing fiction from literary and historical to crime, thriller and horror. 📚 Jenny Hewson — a literary agent at Lutyens & Rubinstein in London, who joined after a decade at Rogers, Coleridge & White. The authors she represents have been shortlisted for and won prizes including the Booker and the Women's Prize, and she has a particular love of distinctive literary voices. 📚 Katie Seaman — an editor who spent a decade commissioning fiction at major publishing houses including Penguin Random House and HarperCollins, now a freelance editor and book coach across commercial and literary fiction. 📚 Patrick Gleeson — a novelist whose Theatreland Mystery series (Hattie Brings the House Down, Hattie Steals the Show and Hattie Breaks a Leg) is published by Bedford Square.

Hello all — a slightly unusual ask for a Saturday. I'm trying to reach one of our writers, Michelle Reed-Harris, and my emails to her keep bouncing back — I think her address may have changed. She's paid for a service from me that I can't deliver while I've no way of reaching her, and I'd very much like to put that right. If you know Michelle, or happen to be in a writing group with her, could you gently nudge her to drop me a line at [email protected]? Or just say so below and I'll take it from there. Thank you — the reach of this community never stops amazing me.

And passed on to three agents and Patrick Gleeson!

Hi Gang! I won't always be able to respond to messages, but you can email me on: [email protected] Thanks! Issy

We had over 540 entries this year. Quite a small number were highly commended, and those who will be sent to the critics and win will be selected from this list. Around 250 entrants were commended. A commended list of that size can look surprising at first glance, so it's worth explaining how it's arrived at. Every entry was read blind — judges had no idea whose work they were assessing — and scored against a fixed editorial rubric set before reading began. This involved meeting a basic standard of literacy and originality and then being marked on characterisation, use of language and making the reader want to read on. Commended isn't a capped list or a quota handed out so that everyone goes home happy. It's the mark for work that genuinely cleared a real editorial bar. The reason the list is substantial is simply that the standard of entry this year was high, and a great many writers met it. That's a fact about the quality of the field, not a softening of the standard. Being commended is a real achievement. Feedback, for what it's worth, is entirely optional and quite separate from the result — it exists because writers asked for it, and it has no bearing whatsoever on whether a piece was commended.