It’s five years since we opened up a slot on the Guardian’s first book award longlist for reader nominations, and it feels like we’ve really hit our stride. Once again we’ve had a stack of excellent suggestions, running the gamut from self-published SF to mainstream memoir. Once again we’ve had mentions of exciting publishers who were totally new to me – shout out to the folks at Blackbird, Nine Arches and Brick Lane. Once again I’ve been amazed and delighted at the richness and vibrancy of our literary culture, the brave people who are boldly taking on the difficult business of making books. Thanks – once again – for all these inspiring nominations.

Sara Baume has been chosen to go through to the longlist, but we were hugely impressed by your other suggestions. Only an idiot would attempt to pick out any selection from such a sparkling list. Which makes me some kind of idiot, I suppose, because here’s Dorothy Lehane, announcing what might almost be a manifesto for her collection Ephemeris at the opening of Cosmic Rays:

hold up cosmic ray
pure niche, bombarding
in relentless droves
wallop by wallop
lousy low energy …

There’s “plenty of astronomical and mathematical playfulness” as Trevien suggests, as well as “experimental rigour”. But there’s “enough of the personal” in this astronomical exploration to “keep you grounded to earth”.

The personal threads through James Rebanks’s account of farming in the Lake District, The Shepherd’s Life. Here he is in the depths of winter, struggling with a fall of snow that is a “killer” for the flock:

We find some of the ewes quickly. Coated in snow. Faces white. Their black friendly eyes seem pleased to see me, their wool insulating the snow that lands on them from the heat of their bodies. They rush to my legs and start on the hay. I count them, but it is hard because other ewes are emerging out of the blizzard from all directions. I struggle to get a decent count, but some are missing, maybe a dozen. I have a decision to make … If I stay here much longer, the quad bike will get stuck in the lane and I might get into all sorts of trouble and might not get back for the other flocks.

This “combative account of a misunderstood way of life … risks offending many of its likely readers”, says paintedjaguar. Rebanks puts the case for “an ancient and difficult way of life”, making this “essential reading not just for anyone who loves the Lake District”.

Slam poet Sophia Walker is heading elsewhere, following the advice on the card given to her the day she graduated from high school: “Always travel in the direction / opposite to the tour bus.” EllaEllaEllaLa only picked it up “because a friend guilted me into it after I failed to put money in her bucket at the end of a free poetry night”, but found Walker’s poems “compelling on [the] page”.

Here Walker is in Deserted Storm, watching the DVD Jay brought back from Basra – a collection of footage filmed from the tank’s gun turret:

Day one showed homes bombed down like
dominoes, cars explode, everything destroyed
in the tank’s forward roll.

Day two showed dismembered torsos, pulps of skin and
shattered bone. Overturned cars were funeral homes,
rubble piles with lives inside became burning pyres.”

Walker’s performances – like this version of Deserted Storm on YouTube – present well on paper, EllaEllaEllaLa continues, where she reveals “an impressive ability to juggle syllables and rhyme schemes and very visual word play to great effect”.

Another slim volume is Preti Taneja’s Kumkum Malhotra, a “jewel of a novella”, says Vinaigrette, that weaves “insight and psychological truths into … light, clean prose”.

Here Kumkum finds herself at the gate of her Delhi house, confronted by a fly-infested skull that has been left by the gate “for her family to find”:

Someone must have wanted to insult them. Someone against Shalu? Someone maybe thinks she is not visiting the temple enough, that her children are running too wild. Someone always has something to say. She licks her dry lips. She can almost see a tongue lolling from the skull’s half jaw: thirsting. But the thing is silent, its tongue long gone – swallowed by what she can’t imagine. Its eyes don’t see and yet the sockets are alive; they are buzzing with life.

This “inventive, strage” story, continues Vinaigrette, is “about a woman – a mother and wife – who fades from her own life and story”.

The choice

Which brings us to Sara Baume and Spill Simmer Falter Wither. The narrator, Ray, has faded from his own life long before the novel begins. We find him at 57, “too old for starting over, too young for giving up”, living in the salmon-pink house he shared with his father. The bulk of the novel is addressed to the dog Ray discovers advertised in a jumble shop on the opening page, a black, one-eyed terrier with a “feathery white beard from underside muzzle to uppermost nipples” and a “maggot nose”. One Eye’s photograph is taped to the bottommost corner of the window, underneath a “hotchpotch of pleading eyes, foreheads worried into furry folds, tails frozen into a hopeful wag”.

Your photograph is the least distinct and your face is the most grisly. I have to bend down to inspect you and as I move, the shadows shift with my bending body and blank out the glass of the jumble shop window, and I see myself instead. I see my head sticking out of your back like a bizarre excrescence. I see my own mangled face peering dolefully from the black.

The life these two damaged individuals make together is measured out over the course of a year as spring turns to summer, autumn into winter in prose so “well crafted and pleasing to read” that rossboss was moved to nominate it even while still “engrossed”.

“It’s about a man and a dog, two outsiders and so much more besides,” rossboss adds. “The prose is poetic, it makes me want to read it all aloud.”

I’m looking forward to hearing if the judges find themselves declaiming Spill Simmer Falter Wither as it goes forward on to the longlist for the 2015 Guardian first book award. With the rest of the longlist due to be announced next week, it’s congratulations to Sara Baume, Tramp Press in Ireland and William Heinemann in the UK, and thanks again to all of you for such a marvellous and varied set of nominations.