The Book of Days by Francesca Kay has been shortlisted for the Walter Scott Prize for Historical Fiction 2025 alongside five novels.
The judges comments on The Book of Days: ‘A quiet book set in unstable times requires particular writerly skills and Francesca Kay displays them in full. Carefully, meticulously, beautifully, she draws us into the entire world of the young wife of a dying husband, his main concern the fate of his immortal soul. Henry VIII, that religious wrecking-ball, is dying, so immortal souls are political as well as personal, and the building of a chantry, evoked by Kay with such skill you can see it, smell it, marvel at it, drives the narrative tension with expert control. But that’s not all. Like a medieval Book of Hours, in her Book of Days Kay intertwines the natural seasons with the liturgical year so the two are braided together like an illuminated manuscript. The Book of Days may be a quiet book, but it shines.’
The judges of this year’s Prize, chaired by Katie Grant, said:
‘From the escapades of young combatants in the Peloponnesian war in Sicily in the 5th century BC to a tender story of families isolated at home in the great British winter freeze of 1962/3, the shortlisted novels for this year’s Walter Scott Prize paint a wide literary canvas of richness and subtlety. They are a celebration of storytelling, encompassing a tale of revenge and reconciliation in post-occupation Netherlands, a picture of family claustrophobia in Tudor England, an exhilarating cross-country adventure through the Wild West, and a revelatory exploration of evil – under a thick social disguise – in 1950s New York. Together the books illustrate the founding principles of the Prize, bringing stories set in the past into our own time, through fine writing that is infused with ambition and originality to produce novels guaranteed to live long in the memory.’
The winner of the 2025 Walter Scott Prize will be revealed on 12th June in a live event at the Borders Book Festival in Melrose, Scotland.
