Cape bags two on Encore Award shortlist

Two books from Jonathan Cape are on the shortlist for the £10,000 RSL Encore Award for the best second novel of the year.

This year's prize mark's the award's 30th year and is being judged by RSL fellows Edmund Gordon, Nikita Lalwani and Eley Williams. 

Shortlisted is Patrick McGuinness for Throw Me to the Wolves (Jonathan Cape), described by Lalwani as a “beautifully rendered thriller, full of virtuosic prose”. Also from Cape is Billy O’Callaghan's My Coney Island Baby, which Gordon praised as a “wise, tender, and exquisitely tuned novel about the end of a love affair in middle age”.

David Keenan appears on the shortlist with For the Good Times (Faber), which won the Gordon Burn Prize last year. Williams said: “This is the past written as spirited and brutal conjuration: incendiary, intimate, absurdist and disquieting story-telling by a master of his craft.” There is also an appearance for Shiromi Pinto's Plastic Emotions (Influx Press). Lalwani said: “Pinto navigates the politics of desire and genius with skilful understanding, in this elegant imagining of lost feminist icon Minnette de Silva, the first Sri Lankan architect.”

Finally, Luiza Sauma is listed for Everything You Ever Wanted (Viking). Gordon said: “Knitting together strands of realism, satire, science fiction and allegory, and moving deftly between comedy and pathos, it is a work of thrilling imaginative boldness.”

The winner will be announced on 25th June.

Previous winners of the prize include Ali Smith and Anne Enright, while last year's winner was Sally Rooney's Normal People (Faber).