Galaxy National Book Awards have been around for twenty years or so. It's a televised event (that likens itself to the Oscars) designed to bring attention to the best in British publishing. Individual retailers sponsor the ten categories which range from Biography to Children's fiction.
The
2009 Galaxy Book of the Year was
The Suspicions of Mr. Whicher: a murder and the undoing of a great Victorian detective by
Kate Summerscale 
"In June of 1860 three-year-old Saville Kent was found at the bottom of an outdoor privy with his throat slit. The crime horrified all England and led to a national obsession with detection, ironically destroying, in the process, the career of perhaps the greatest detective in the land. Inspector Jonathan Whicher's real legacy, however, lives on in fiction: the tough, quirky, all-knowing and all-seeing detective that we know and love today...from the cryptic Sgt. Cuff in Wilkie Collins's The Moonstone to Dashiell Hammett's Sam Spade.
The Suspicions of Mr. Whicher reads like the best of Victorian thrillers, and has been nominated for the Samuel Johnson Prize in London." - publisher
Amongst this year's nominees are:

Dead Like Youby
Peter JamesOne Dayby
David NichollsThe Red Queenby
Philippa GregoryWorth Dying Forby
Lee Child
At Home: a short history of private lifeby
Bill BrysonD-Day: the battle for Normandy by
Antony BeevorOperation Mincemeat: how a dead man and a bizarre plan fooled the Nazis and assured an allied victoryby
Ben MacIntyre
The Hare With Amber Eyes by
Edmund de WaalMr Rosenblum Dreams in Englishby
Natasha SolomonA Thousand Cutsby
Simon Lelic
Kitchen: Recipes from the heart of the homeby
Nigella LawsonA Journey: my political lifeby
Tony Blair
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