We are delighted by the news that Elizabeth Brooks’ haunting and mesmerising debut novel, The Call of the Curlew, has been shortlisted for The Waverton Good Read Award 2018. The award, established in 2003, aims to stimulate reading and provide encouragement to debut writers. The Call of the Curlew was published in the UK in June 2018 by Doubleday, with the paperback to follow in May 2019.

Virginia Wrathmell has always known she will meet her death on the marsh.

One snowy New Year’s Eve, at the age of eighty-six, Virginia feels the time has finally come.

New Year’s Eve, 1939. Virginia is ten, an orphan arriving to meet her new parents at their mysterious house, Salt Winds. Her new home sits on the edge of a vast marsh, a beautiful but dangerous place. War feels far away out here amongst the birds and shifting sands – until the day a German fighter plane crashes into the marsh. The people at Salt Winds are the only ones to see it.

What happens next is something Virginia will regret for the next seventy-five years, and which will change the whole course of her life.

Elizabeth Brooks grew up in a book-loving, story-telling family in Chester. Ever since visiting Haworth Parsonage at the age of 13 she has wanted to be a novelist, and has written numerous opening paragraphs in her time (ruining many a pristine notebook in the process).

Between 1998 and 2001 she read Classics at Newnham College, Cambridge. On graduating, she married and moved to the Isle of Man, where she still lives with her husband and two children. Over the years she has plugged away at her writing, finally managing to get beyond the first few hundred words in order to complete Call of the Curlew.