SFBook Book of the year 2013

This last 12 months have seen some outstanding pieces of literature released, some of them from well established authors such as Stephen King, Terry Pratchett, Paul McAuley, Christopher Priest and Adam Roberts (to name a few) but with many surprises from new voices such as Peter Higgins, Andrew Buckley, Al Ewing, Jay Posey and Stella Gemmell (again to name but a few).

On the awards front it's been an interesting year. Both the Hugo and Locus award for best novel was won by John Scalzi's parody Redshirts, the Nebula by Kim Stanley Robinson for 2312 while Adam Roberts took home both the BSFA and John W Campbell award for Jack Glass. The World Fantasy award went to the quite special novel Alif the Unseen by G. Willow Wilson and the Philip K Dick to a dystopian novel called Lost Everything by Brian Francis Slattery.

I was very glad to see Chris Beckett pick up the Arthur C Clarke award for Dark Eden while Brent Weeks managed to beat off competition from Joe Abercrombie, Helen Lowe, Mark Lawrence & Jay Kristoff to win the David Gemmell award for "The Blinding Knife".

Personally it's been a difficult year not just to find time to read even a fraction of the books we've wanted to here at SFBook but also to judge which book should be "book of the month" and therefore in the shortlist for book of the year.

As a reminder those on the shortlist are:

I'm sure you will agree a great list and as ever it's taken a great deal of thought to choose only one winner. Ultimately there was one book that stood out though.

The winner of the SFBook Book of the year goes to:

Wolfhound Century by Peter Higgins

A big congratulations go to author Peter Higgins and publisher Gollancz! For those who've already read the book, the sequel "Truth and Fear" is due out in March 2014, we await with baited breath....