Surfing the zeitgeist ... Photograph: Nic Bothma/EPA
A friend who was a travel rep used to complain that it was hell working in the leisure industry because you had to work when everyone else was on holiday. After a summer grappling with 170 books - the biggest ever submission for the Guardian first book award - I know what she meant.
There were times when I despaired that so much effort had been expended to so little effect. Times when I had to remind myself that one of the points of reading a novel is to put your feet up and get away from it all.
There were the Nowhere Books - perfectly respectable works which for no apparent reason seem to have fallen into a black hole (it might not be an award-winner, but I was mystified that Julia Rochester's The Candelaria Massacre, a rather moving account of an infamous massacre of street children in Brazil, got no national newspaper coverage whatsoever).
Then there were the Everywhere Books - usually novels - which seemed to have surfed the zeitgeist far further than, in my opinion, they deserved to go (these shall remain nameless, though you need look no further than the longlists of some of the year's other literary prizes).
Nevertheless, whittling all the entries down to a field of 10 - spanning fiction, non-fiction and poetry - was a tough job, made easier only by the fact that several leading contenders disqualified themselves at the 11th hour: Virago, publisher of Lauren Liebenberg's The Voluptuous Delights of Peanut Butter and Jam, forgot to mention that Liebenberg once wrote a history of e-banking; while Bloomsbury's surprise hit, The Guernsey Literary and Potato Peel Pie Society, was ruled out for the melancholy reason that its author Mary Ann Shaffer died before her novel was complete, and her niece - who finished if off for her and is jointly credited in some editions - is a published children's author.
We ended up with four novels, one book of short stories, a poetry collection and three or four non-fiction titles, depending on whether you classify Me Cheeta: The Autobiography (by the chimp who starred in the Tarzan movies) as fact or fiction.
To those who argue for excluding American books from prizes, on the basis that they would swamp the local talent, I would point out that this year's longlist includes only one American, the music critic Alex Ross, though the geographical spread is a wide as ever, with authors from Australia, Nigeria and Pakistan as well as possibly the strongest contingent from the UK in the 10 years of the prize.
As Waterstone's reading groups across the country start out on the shortlisting process, perhaps the best assurance I can give them is that, whatever quarrels they have with individual titles, if these 10 were the only books they read all year, they would get a pretty good idea of the energy, intelligence and wit of the best new writing today.
