Mayflies

Everyone has a Tully Dawson: the friend who defines your life.

In the summer of 1986, in a small Scottish town, James and Tully ignite a brilliant friendship based on music, films and the rebel spirit. With school over and the locked world of their fathers before them, they rush towards the climax of their youth: a magical weekend in Manchester, the epicentre of everything that inspires them in working-class Britain. There, against the greatest soundtrack ever recorded, a vow is made: to go at life differently. Thirty years on, half a life away, the phone rings. Tully has news.

Mayflies is a memorial to youth’s euphorias and to everyday tragedy. A tender goodbye to an old union, it discovers the joy and the costs of love.

Shortlisted for this month

Scabby Queen – Krirstin Innes

Now that she’s gone, those who loved her, those who hated her and those who felt bot

Who was Cli

Three days before her fifty-first birthday, Clio Campbell – one-hit-wonder, political activist, life-long-love and one-night-stand – kills herself in her friend Ruth’s spare bedroom. And, as practical as she is, Ruth doesn’t know what to do. Or how to feel. Because knowing and loving Clio Campbell was never straightforward.

As news spreads, the story of Clio’s life spreads with it: from the Isle of Skye to an anarchist squat in Brixton, from a yoga retreat in Greece to Glasgow on the night of the Scottish referendum. Half a century of memories, of pain and of joy, and that peculiar feeling in between the two, are wrenched to the surface.

Scabby Queen is a portrait of a woman who refuses to compromise, and a picture of a country that does nothing but. It’s about the silencing of women’s voices, about the destructive power of the celebrity machine, but most of all it is about empathy: its limits and the way it endlessly transformed.

After you’d Gone – Maggie O’Farrell

A distraught young woman boards a train at King’s Cross to return to her family in Scotland. Six hours later, she catches sight of something so terrible in a mirror at Waverley Station that she gets on the next train back to London.

AFTER YOU’D GONE follows Alice’s mental journey through her own past, after a traffic accident has left her in a coma. A love story that is also a story of absence, and of how our choices can reverberate through the generations, it slowly draws us closer to a dark secret at a family’s heart.