Top 10 out-of-town tales

Edward Hogan is the winner of the Desmond Elliott first novel prize for Blackmoor, his story of a Derbyshire village during the miners' strike.

For the Guardian, he named a top ten list of stories set outside the city.

One book on the list:

The Butcher Boy by Patrick McCabe

An incredible first line: "When I was a young lad twenty or thirty or forty years ago I lived in a small town where they were all after me on account of what I done on Mrs Nugent." You'd be right to be suspicious of a narrator with a two-decade margin of error concerning his own age. A stunning tale of a town that can't control the man it has created. I imagine it influenced Ross Raisin's excellent debut, God's Own Country, set in agricultural Yorkshire.

Read about another book on Hogan's list.

The Butcher Boy also appears on crime writer Declan Burke's top ten list of Irish crime fiction.

--Marshal Zeringue