Picture: Authors’ Club
TIEPOLO BLUE, James Cahill’s electric debut, has advanced to the shortlist for the Authors’ Club Best First Novel Award.
The Authors’ Club Best First Novel Award was established in 1954, making it the longest-running UK prize for debut fiction and, overall, the third oldest literary prize in Britain. Past winners include Gail Honeyman, Jackie Kay and the late Gilbert Adair, also a Blake Friedmann client. This year’s winner will be revealed at dinner on 24 May, to be held at the National Liberal Club.
Also shortlisted alongside James are: THE DICTATOR’S WIFE by Freya Berry, MY NAME IS YIP by Paddy Crewe, WHEN WE WERE BIRDS by Ayanna Lloyd Banwo, BLACK BUTTERFLIES by Priscilla Morris, and THE WHALEBONE THEATRE by Joanna Quinn.
Lucy Popescu, the chair of the judging panel, said: ‘We are proud to recommend six exceptional debuts. These dazzling novelists cover a range of subjects from art and privilege, love and loss, knowledge and selfhood, the pursuit of power and the devastating consequences of war. We travel with them through eastern Europe to the American Frontier, from England’s past to Trinidad today.’
TIEPOLO BLUE follows the unravelling of revered art historian Donald Lamb. Freed from the constraints of academia, it looks like the anarchic contemporary art scene of 1990s London might be his salvation, but he soon suffers an earth-shattering fall from grace that leaves him questioning everyone and everything.
TIEPOLO BLUE was published in hardback by Sceptre in June 2022 to great acclaim. It attracted widespread praise, including from Patrick Gale and Stephen Fry (the latter describing it as ‘The best novel I have read for ages’), and was also included in the BBC’s and Times Literary Supplement’s ‘Best of 2022’ lists. It will be published in paperback on 27 April 2023.
James is currently writing his second novel, THE VIOLET HOUR, a sweeping psychological drama and satire of the international art world, which will be published in hardback by Sceptre in summer 2024.
Praise for TIEPOLO BLUE
‘Startlingly impressive . . . a heavily perfumed, sexually tender, psychologically acute novel’ – Claire Allfree, Daily Mail
‘The story of Tiepolo Blue and its people have invaded my dreams . . . Don’s disintegration is painful to read, but it all grips you like a thriller. My heart was constantly in my throat as I read… There is so much to enjoy, to contemplate, to wonder at, and to be lost in’ – Stephen Fry
‘Not only an addictive pageturner, Cahill’s book taps into the tensions and suspicions between generations that feel incredibly relevant for our testy times’ – Jessie Thompson, Evening Standard
‘The spirit of E. M. Forster is alive and well in James Cahill. The same palpating of damaged moral tissue, the same psychological canniness, the same gently invoked erudition, the same exactitude and eloquence’ – Edmund White
‘The plot is propulsive, though the crafted ambience of unease simultaneously destabilizes the reader at every turn . . . It’s a measure of Cahill’s sleight of hand that he manages to inject his plot with such page-turning momentum’ – Lucasta Miller, TLS
‘Tells a gripping tale of the worlds of traditional academia and art history pitted against those of contemporary art, each failing horribly to understand the other. As a result, all becomes infused with satirical comedy and ghastly tragedy’ – Norman Rosenthal
‘I just devoured Tiepolo Blue, I could not put it down. The longing, the beauty, the detail, the complexity, the art, the intellect and the emotion . . . What a triumph!’ – Paul Kindersley
‘Interrogating beauty and meaning in art, Tiepolo Blue rewards rereading . . . a stylish tale of love and long-game revenge’ – Rebecca Swirsky, Royal Academy Magazine
‘Dizzying and exciting and unsettling, and beautifully told’ – Reverend Richard Coles, ‘Big Writers on Their Best Reads of 2022’, Daily Mail
‘This is a novel full of suspense and surprise. It made me laugh and brought back memories of a time in my own life. I missed the characters as soon as I’d finished’ – Sarah Lucas
‘The musings of the book’s protagonist on the radical power of art to act as a catalyst for personal change make it an exhilarating, erudite read’ – Liam Hess, Vogue.com
‘I travelled on the exquisite vessel of James Cahill’s prose, unable to disembark. The journey is sensual, treacherous and elegiac. The final landing, breathtaking’ – Maggi Hambling
‘[An] arresting debut novel . . . a masterly attention to detail and an irresistibly propulsive, almost swaggering style’ – Michael Delgado, Literary Review
‘Wow. It is magnificent. Simply magnificent . . . Tiepolo Blue really has blown me away: the gorgeous phrase-making; the sure-footed pacing; the (re-)immersion in a world I know, or knew, in a way that is both hard-edged with historical detail and almost hallucinatory’ – Robert Douglas-Fairhurst
About James Cahill
Picture: Darren Wheeler
James Cahill was born in London. Over the past decade, he has worked in the art world and academia, combining writing and research with a role at a leading contemporary art gallery.
His writing on art has appeared in publications including The Burlington Magazine, The Times Literary Supplement, The Los Angeles Review of Books, and The London Review of Books. He was the lead author and consulting editor of FLYING TOO CLOSE TO THE SUN (Phaidon, 2018), a survey of classical myth in art from antiquity to the present day. He was the co-curator of ‘The Classical Now’, an exhibition at King’s College London (March-April 2018), examining the relationships between ancient, modern and contemporary art. He is completing his second novel THE VIOLET HOUR (Sceptre, 2024).
He is currently a Research Fellow in Classics at King’s College London.