The Costa Book Awards has unveiled its five winning titles for 2021 – here’s how to buy them

Lauded by the judges as “deeply moving”, Open Water is the love story between two young black British artists after they meet in a south-east London pub. One a dancer and the other a photographer, it tells of the two trying to make it in a city that both celebrates and rejects them. Praised by fellow writers including Bernadine Evaristo and Candice Carty-Williams, Caleb Azumah Nelson is a name to know for 2022.

Exploring the settting of rural poverty occupied by a set of twins living on the fringes of society, the Costa judges called Fuller’s fourth novel a “masterpiece of storytelling and craft”. At the age of 51, Jeanie and Julius still reside with their mother in an old isolated cottage. When she dies, their world is thrown into chaos, leading to a story of resilience and survival – and, as their mother’s secrets begin to unravel, a heart-stopping betrayal.

Poet Hannah Lowe’s third collection of sonnets draws on a decade of experience teaching sixth-form students in an inner-city London school during the 2000s. Other verses in the tome take inspiration from her teenage years growing up in the Eighties and Nineties, as well as her own motherhood and experience of raising a small son in the nation’s capital. The judges praised it as a “page turner” that made them “want to punch the air with joy”.

Winning the Costa biography award, John Preston’s book about media mogul Robert Maxwell was said by the judges to be “epic” and a “unanimous winner”. Recounting how the Jewish Maxwell fled the Nazi occupation of Czechoslovakia as a teenager, to later go on to become a Labour MP and businessman, Preston outlines the long-hidden debts and dodgy dealings that came to light upon his death. Maxwell disappeared from his yacht (named after his recently convicted daughter Ghislaine Maxwell) in 1991, and was later found dead in the sea.

Said by the judges to be “brilliant” and “a wonder”, Manjeet Mann’s second book explores themes of hope, grief and the tragedies of life as a refugee. The verse novel tells the story of two teenagers from very opposite worlds whose paths unexpectedly intertwine. Natalie – who lives with her family in Dover – has just lost her mother, while Sammy has fled his home and family in Eritrea to cross the channel in hope of a better future.