Where have all the boys gone? The fact that they're not to be found on the shortlist for the Costa first novel award comes as no particular surprise to me, as the person responsible for longlisting for the Guardian first book prize. Two of the Costa shortlistees - Tahmima Anam and Catherine O'Flynn - are on both lists, and while we do have a male novelist, Dinaw Mengestu, on our list (which is open to fiction and non-fiction alike), he is not eligible for the Costa on account of being based in the US.
This sort of rigmarole might seem nerdy but if you're going to decode prizes you have to understand where they're coming from. If you reduce the absence of boys to the fact that there just didn't happen to be any UK domiciled first-time male novelists of note in this particular 12 months, then so what? More interesting than their gender is the fact that three of the four shortlisted debutantes are from the Indian sub-continent (imagine how much more familiar Ethiopian fiction like Mengestu's would be were his generation of talented young emigrants to have chosen London as their destination instead of Washington).
Both Tahmima Anam and Roma Tearne set domestic stories against a backdrop of war - Anam in Bangladesh, and Tearne in Sri Lanka. These are big stories, with themes and landscapes that stretch far beyond the "little England" that has arguably kept the postwar English novel shivering in the shadow of its American counterpart.
Though set mostly in the UK, Nikita Lalwani's Gifted also explores cultural boundaries by looking at the devastating contradictions that confront a female maths prodigy from a family struggling to maintain its Indian identity in Cardiff.
All three stories have a curiosity value. They aren't settings, or characters - or wars - that have appeared regularly in English fiction before. The novels feel substantial and pressing, because their subjects are substantial and pressing.
This picks up a theme noted by Giles Foden as a judge of this year's Booker prize. He was struck by "the degree of importance ascribed to subject matter ... and what might be loosely described as the 'moral status' of books." In other words, it's not just fine writing that counts - we want information and a sense of being thrown a guideline to help us negotiate unfamiliar, sometimes difficult terrain. And naturally we look to guides with what we believe is first-hand experience.
Foden also noted the desire for "sympathy with main characters" - and here's where the gender of these writers may come into play: all four bring the political into the domestic sphere just as Elizabeth Gaskell and George Eliot did all those years ago.
