The Richard & Judy team and Pan Macmillan whittled the entries down to a shortlist of five.
Spencer Jordan is the last of our 4 featured runners-up...
Spencer Jordan has worked as a software engineer and more recently as a lecturer at the university of Wales. He lives in Cardiff. Journeys in the Dead Season is his first novel.
So little natural light falls into my cell, and I have such a limited view from my window, that at times I feel as though I am entombed within a coffin... Down here, deep within the soil, I must content myself with mental excursions only, tripping beneath the canopies of forests that exist solely in the mind...
A prisoner is on remand in Durham high security jail for what turns out to have been a series of attacks on young girls across Leicestershire, culminating in abduction, rape and murder.
In the autumn of 1922, Captain Crowe is on a journey across Leicestershire. He intends to visit his old comrades from the war and finish writing his book on horticulture.
The prisoner is reading a copy of Crowe’s book, Perambulations of a Soldier: Autumn to Winter. Crowe’s retelling of his odyssey in his letters, their subsequent appearance within Perambulations and the prisoner’s interpretation of them create a macabre fusion of past and present where fact and fiction, truth and reality, begin to merge and coalesce...
Juxtaposing the experiences of a shellshock victim in the early 1920s with the recollections of an alleged child-murderer in the present day, Journeys in the Dead Season is a masterpiece of psychological complexity and subtlety. In the vein of writers such as Kazuo Ishiguro and Beryl Bainbridge, Spencer Jordan plays with voice, place and time to create and enthralling narrative that is both metaphysically haunting and deeply compelling.
