Ajay Close wins Scotland’s National Book Awards Fiction Book of the Year

Posted on December 2, 2024

A huge congratulations to Ajay Close on wining Fiction Book of the Year at Scotland’s National Book Awards 2024, for What Doesn’t Kill Us.

The judges called the novel, “Superb, evocative and enraging, with brilliant characterisation, humour, and a huge sense of tension from the ever-present threat of violence.”

In What Doesn’t Kill Us, Ajay Close combines the power and passion of the Women’s Lib movement with the tension of a police procedural. Based on true events, the novel also speaks to today’s conversations about the police and their failure to protect women. A character-driven drama, it examines the women whose lives were affected in myriad ways by the actions of one notorious killer, without exploring the motives or psychology of the perpetrator.

By turns emotional, action-packed and darkly funny, What Doesn’t Kill Us reveals just how much the world has changed since the 1970s – and how much it hasn’t.

A full list of Scotland’s National Book Awards winners can be found here.

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What Doesn’t Kill Us is included in our Paperback Fiction Bundle and the Trussell Trust and Paperback Bundle.

Ajay Close grew up in Yorkshire and, after her school years at a Sheffield comprehensive, studied at Cambridge. She worked at Granta before becoming a journalist and then a novelist. She is the author of seven literary novels, of which her first, Official and Doubtful, was longlisted for the Orange Prize. Her novels are pacy, often political, page-turning, dealing with family and relationships under pressure, and can be read as thrillers.