As she starts testing the limits of their prison, investigating ways she might escape, she is confronted by decisions that haunt her past. The festive holidays are the perfect time to escape the cold, cosy up with a hot drink and lose yourself in a new book.

I thought it was interesting that their names weren’t immediately obvious as to who was who, just removed enough from perhaps a more familiar set of names. In every chapter, paragraph and sentence we are invited to ask how we feel, how Watson has made us feel. One could argue that the novel does not transport the reader as originally intended as these matters are happening on our doorstep. Their lives revolve around a pill clock that dispenses pills every 8 hours to keep them alive on the island. His debut novel, Metronome, was shortlisted for the Bridport Prize, and his short fiction has been shortlisted for the Bristol Short Story Prize and awarded runner-up for the Seán Ó Faoláin Prize.We don’t share your credit card details with third-party sellers, and we don’t sell your information to others. Metronome by Tom Watson was published in hardback by Bloomsbury on 31 March 2022 and is the author's debut novel. Do we look at Whitney and Aina as the same people at the end as they were at the beginning – and in their shoes, would we be, after 12 years? Metronome by Tom Watson is out now, and is soon to be on BBC2’s excellent book show, Between The Covers.

Aina tends the garden, cooks, helps harvest anything useful from the 12 shipwrecks that lie about on the beach while Whitney has his projects. As Aina starts to suspect that Whitney has known this all along, the trust between them evaporates and she starts plotting how to make a journey longer than the 8-hour window between pills. For Arthur Dent, who has only just had his house demolished that morning, this seems already to be more than he can cope with. I had submitted things to her previously, so I knew who she was, and I was massively taken aback when Metronome won the Giles Gordon prize, which she judged for Curtis Brown. These are dispensed via an automated “pill clock”, activated by the thumb print of the designated user, keeping the miscreants effectively tethered to their place of exile.According to Wille, fire speeds things up for example, water slows things down; air gives focus and earth opens out. And according to the residents of the Japanese island of Okinawa - the world's longest-living people - finding it is the key to a longer and more fulfilled life. The connection to the sculptures is not obvious at first but once the connection is made, coupled with Whitney’s own artworks, it is explosive. How did you decide which dystopian elements to include, and was it difficult to rein in your imagination once you got started? It is mysterious, intriguing, has more than a hint of the dystopian and examines the very depth of humanity which ticks a lot of boxes.