01 Jul 2012 02:49:53
The debut, which beat titles including Before I Go to Sleep by SJ Watson and Patrick McGuinness's The Last Hundred Days to win the award, is narrated by 10-year-old Judith McPherson, a member of the Christian Brotherhood of the Last Days. Bullied at school, Judith finds solace in the model world she creates in her bedroom: "An acorn cup becomes a bowl, toothpaste caps funnels for ocean liners, twigs knees for an ostrich." When she makes it snow in her Land of Decoration, and it snows in reality, she starts to believe she can work miracles.
Judges of the Desmond Elliott prize, set up in memory of the publisher and literary agent Desmond Elliott, said the novel was "unlike anything you have ever read". Chair and author Sam Llewellyn, who was published by the late agent himself, called it "a novel that can move the reader from sadness to laughter with alarming suddenness. Grace McCleen's voice sparkles with imagery and ideas, and she uses it to tell a story that is simultaneously multi-layered and absolutely compelling."
Like Judith, McCleen grew up in a Christian sect in Wales. "There were happy moment and very difficult moments. I drew on the difficult parts to write The Land of Decoration," she said.
The author was removed from school at the age of 10, and when she returned, a teacher advised her to apply for university. She read English literature at Oxford and did an MA at York. "When I left university I had a breakdown and couldn't stay in the cult any more, and that was my doorway out, but I stayed in religion through university," she said.
When she was 27 she wrote a long novel that "didn't work", so she developed a passage that began "In the beginning there was an empty room..." into The Land of Decoration. She landed an agent within a week.
"I think the child narrator is appealing to a lot of people," she said. "Maybe I wouldn't have been able to talk about religion in such an engaging way if I'd had an adult narrator."
McCleen is the fifth winner of the Desmond Elliott prize, with all four previous winners – who include Ali Shaw and Edward Hogan – having gone on to publish second novels. McCleen has two more novels lined up for publication, which she said were "very different in style" to The Land of Decoration.
