Sunday Read: An Excerpt from Goodreads Choice Award Winner, Fiction

The end of the year brought with it the usual overwhelming wave of lists announcing the best books of the 2014, chosen by a variety of critics using different methods to determine the past year’s top books. The Good Reads Choice Awards is one of a few, if not the only, major book awards where the readers have all the say.

Our very own Sarah Lotz and Lauren Beukes made it to the semifinals of the 2014 awards in the Best Horror category, but it was Anne Rice who walked away with the title of reader’s favourite for Prince Lestat, the latest in her series The Vampire Chronicles.

The winner in the fiction category received an impressive total of 46 154 votes, a whopping 13 301 more than the runner up. For today’s Sunday Read we present an excerpt from the Good Reads Choice winner, Landline by Raibow Rowell, which is described as “a hilarious, heart-wrenching take on love, marriage, and magic phones”:

CHAPTER 1

Georgie pulled into the driveway, swerving to miss a bike.
Neal never made Alice put it away.

Apparently bicycles never got stolen back in Nebraska—and people never tried to break in to your house. Neal didn’t even lock the front door most nights until after Georgie came home, though she’d told him that was like putting a sign in the yard that said PLEASE ROB US AT GUNPOINT. “No,” he’d said. “That would be different, I think.”

She hauled the bike up onto the porch and opened the (unlocked) door.

The lights were off in the living room, but the TV was still on. Alice had fallen asleep on the couch watching Pink Panther cartoons. Georgie went to turn it off and stumbled over a bowl of milk sitting on the floor. There was a stack of laundry folded on the coffee table—she grabbed whatever was on the top to wipe it up.

When Neal stepped into the archway between the living room and the dining room, Georgie was crouched on the floor, sopping up milk with a pair of her own underwear.
“Sorry,” he said. “Alice wanted to put milk out for Noomi.”

Keep reading: Macmillan Publishers

The winner in the Historical Fiction category also received a remarkable number of votes (41 512). All the Light We Cannot See by Anthony Doerr is en epic novel set during Second World War and follows a blind French girl and an orphaned German boy as they try their best to survive as Europe is engulfed by war.