Mind awards 2006: Book of the Year shortlist announced

Embargoed until: 00:01 hrs Tuesday 11 April 2006

Inspiring books exploring fundamental
human emotions in line for award

Today mental health charity Mind announced the six titles on the shortlist for its Book of the Year 2006, taking place in Mind's 60th anniversary Mind week (13 to 20 May). The award, now in its 25th year, celebrates writing that furthers public understanding of mental health issues in all their forms. Shortlisted works range in genre from novel to memoir to cultural history, but all explore fundamental aspects of emotional life. Love and loss, fear, pain and need are addressed in six powerful books that are in turn moving, enthralling and inspirational. 

The winner will be announced at an awards ceremony on Wednesday 17 May at Glazier's Hall in London, hosted by Mind President Lord Melvyn Bragg. The 12th Journalist of the Year and Mind's Champion of the Year will also be announced at the event.

The Book of the Year judges, Fay Weldon, Blake Morrison and Michèle Roberts, will attend a preview reading at Foyles Bookshop on Wednesday
10 May featuring the six shortlisted books:

The year of magical thinking
Joan Didion (Fourth Estate)
In this profoundly moving book, Joan Didion tries to make sense of a year in which her husband John died suddenly and unexpectedly, and her daughter Quintana fell critically ill and was placed on life support. This was a time that "cut loose any fixed idea I had about death, about illness… about marriage and children and memory… about the shallowness of sanity, about life itself."

Forever today: A memoir of love and amnesia Deborah Wearing (Doubleday)
Deborah Wearing's life was thrown into turmoil in 1985 when her husband, Clive, brilliant conductor and BBC music producer, fell prey to a virus that would destroy his memory. This is both the story of their loss and of their love for one another. "He could not remember a thing that had ever happened to him.  But he remembered me."

Fear: A cultural history
Joanna Bourke (Virago)
Fear is one of the most primal emotions, and it takes many forms, both public and private, social and personal. Joanna Bourke's incisive sociocultural study considers what fear meant at different points in the twentieth century - and where we are heading in the twenty-first. "Neither preparing for disaster in this world or the next will make us ready for our own personal encounter with death. We are all sorely afraid." 

Borrowed body
Valerie Mason-John (Serpent's Tail)
A poignant depiction of a childhood spent in care, Valerie Mason-John's debut novel blends fictional memoir and magic realism to explore the world of lead character Pauline. "I used to think my life began at four and a half, and now I know why. Everyone I had ever met before then had died. Dead meant people who came into my life, then disappeared, and who I never saw again."

Shouldn't I be feeling better by now?
Edited by Yvonne Bates (Palgrave)
In the first collection of its type, Yvonne Bates has drawn together contributions from clients and practitioners to discuss therapy that damages rather than heals. It asks why and how things can go wrong, and offers constructive analytical insight into current therapy practices from the client and therapist perspective. "My life for the past 40 years seems to have been conducted for the benefit of psychotherapists."

The hungry years: confessions of a food addict
William Leith (Bloomsbury)
Often darkly comic, though ultimately deeply personal, this is a memoir of William Leith's journey through an addiction that was ruling his life, physically, mentally and emotionally. "Inside the binge you are pure hunger - pure aspiration. Nothing else." Not your typical diet book, this will however change the way you look at food.

This year Mind week focuses on motherhood and depression - launching new report Out of the blue? Motherhood and depression on Monday 15 May, which investigates the problems faced by the one in six women who will experience depression around the birth of a child.

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