# Top 26 Costa Book Award-Winning Novels

> Four decades of judges' favourites, some provocative, some quietly devastating. Pick the one that has aged best.

*By YPB Team · Published October 16, 2026 · https://youpick.best/ranking/top-26-costa-book-award-winning-novels*

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## Current results (no votes yet)

1. **The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time** — score 1000/1000
   Mark Haddon's 2003 mystery narrated by a teenage boy with an unusual mind.
2. **Days Without End** — score 953/1000
   Sebastian Barry's 2016 novel of two soldiers in love on the American frontier.
3. **Normal People** — score 897/1000
   Sally Rooney's 2018 novel of a push-and-pull relationship between two Irish students.
4. **The Children of Dynmouth** — score 718/1000
   William Trevor's 1976 Whitbread Novel winner about a disturbed teenager prowling a quiet seaside town.
5. **How to Be Both** — score 718/1000
   Ali Smith's 2014 two-part novel pairing a Renaissance painter with a modern teenager.
6. **Fools of Fortune** — score 717/1000
   William Trevor's 1983 Whitbread Novel winner tracing an Anglo-Irish family ruined by political violence.
7. **The Satanic Verses** — score 636/1000
   Salman Rushdie's 1988 magic-realist novel, one of the most controversial books of its era.
8. **Restless** — score 636/1000
   William Boyd's 2006 spy novel about a mother revealing her wartime life as an agent.
9. **The Secret Scripture** — score 636/1000
   Sebastian Barry's 2008 novel of a centenarian Irish woman recalling her long life in an asylum.
10. **Bring Up the Bodies** — score 538/1000
   Hilary Mantel's 2012 Booker-winning sequel following Thomas Cromwell and the fall of Anne Boleyn.
11. **Life After Life** — score 538/1000
   Kate Atkinson's 2013 novel of a woman who relives the same life again and again.
12. **Unsettled Ground** — score 538/1000
   Claire Fuller's 2021 novel of middle-aged twins facing eviction and family secrets in rural England.
13. **The Child in Time** — score 419/1000
   Ian McEwan's 1987 novel about a father coping with the abduction of his young daughter.
14. **Poor Things** — score 419/1000
   Alasdair Gray's 1992 Victorian pastiche of a woman resurrected by a surgeon.
15. **Middle England** — score 418/1000
   Jonathan Coe's 2019 state-of-the-nation comedy set around Brexit.
16. **An Artist of the Floating World** — score 0/1000
   Kazuo Ishiguro's 1986 novel of a retired painter reckoning with his past in postwar Japan.
17. **Small Island** — score 0/1000
   Andrea Levy's 2004 novel of Jamaican migrants and their English hosts in postwar London.
18. **The Accidental** — score 0/1000
   Ali Smith's 2005 novel in which a mysterious stranger unsettles a holidaying family.
19. **Felicia's Journey** — score 0/1000
   William Trevor's 1994 thriller following a young Irish woman lured into the English Midlands.
20. **Quarantine** — score 0/1000
   Jim Crace's 1997 retelling of Jesus's forty days in the desert among a group of travellers.
21. **Spies** — score 0/1000
   Michael Frayn's 2002 wartime novel of two boys who suspect a neighbour of being a German agent.
22. **Brooklyn** — score 0/1000
   Colm Tóibín's 2009 novel of an Irish girl emigrating to 1950s New York.
23. **The Hand That First Held Mine** — score 0/1000
   Maggie O'Farrell's 2010 novel linking a 1950s Soho romance with a modern new mother.
24. **Pure** — score 0/1000
   Andrew Miller's 2011 novel about an engineer clearing a Paris cemetery before the Revolution.
25. **A God in Ruins** — score 0/1000
   Kate Atkinson's 2015 companion to Life After Life, following a bomber pilot across a century.
26. **The Mermaid of Black Conch** — score 0/1000
   Monique Roffey's 2020 Caribbean fable of a fisherman and a mermaid he rescues.

Tags: books, uk, awards, fiction, costa awards