An Empire on the Edge: How Britain Came to Fight America by Nick Bunker (Knopf) has won the 2015 George Washington Book Prize, recognizing the best new books on early American history and sponsored by the Gilder Lehrman Institute of American History, Mount Vernon and Washington College. The prize carries a $50,000 award.
The judges called An Empire on the Edge "a probing account of Great Britain's internal political and financial tensions on the eve of revolution. Drawing on a careful study of primary sources from Britain and the United States, Bunker crafts a compelling story of the deepening antagonism between England and her colonies, giving equal weight to the commercial as well as the political ambitions of the British Empire. Bunker's series of fully visualized scenes of familiar events like the Boston Tea Party and lesser-known episodes such as the Gaspee Affair, provides a nuanced description of the Anglo-American conflict."
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Brigid Coady won the £1,000 (about $1,550) Romantic Novelists' Association's Joan Hessayon Award for new writers for her novel No One Wants to be Miss Havisham. The judges said they chose the winner for its "sheer originality and wide range of emotions," calling it "a great story, well written, fast paced and suspenseful. Great chemistry between hero and heroine."