Novelist on long-list for top book award (From Oxford Mail)

Novelist on long-list for top book award

3:54pm Thursday 18th March 2010 in

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A HISTORICAL mystery with links to Oliver Twist and set in Oxford has been nominated for Britain’s top book award for women writers.

Rebecca Gowers, who lives in Summertown, has been long-listed for the Orange prize for her latest novel The Twisted Heart, which tells the love story of mathematician Joe, and Kit, a work-obsessed literature student who is working on a thesis about Victorian crime fiction.

The author, whose grandfather Richard Gowers was a Lord Mayor of Oxford, stumbled on the Oliver Twist link while researching her doctorate in the Bodleian Library.

The author drew on her own discovery to describe how Kit’s research leads her to stumble on a link between the murder of Dickens’s heroine Nancy in Oliver Twist and the real-life murder of the prostitute Eliza Grimwood.

Ms Gowers is competing with 19 other authors, including best-selling writers such as Sarah Waters and Hilary Mantel, for a place on the shortlist, to be announced on April 10.

Ms Mantel, author of Wolf Hall, is at the Oxford Literary Festival on March 28.