Yet another shortlist of potentially award-winning books came out yesterday. The winner will be announced in January 2014. Here’s a useful pdf with a summary of what each is about and here are a few thoughts about the indexes if I can find them.

• Empire Antarctica: Ice, Silence and Emperor Penguins by Gavin Francis (Chatto & Windus) – no index in this book according to the table of contents.

• Hanns and Rudolf: The German Jew and the Hunt for the Kommandant of Auschwitz by Thomas Harding (William Heinemann) – big, detailed biographical index, just what you’d expect for a book of this size. The run-on subheadings can make it difficult to track what is going on because they aren’t in alphabetical order but once you realise they appear in the order that the item appears in the book, it makes more sense.

• The Pike: Gabriele D’Annunzio, Poet, Seducer and Preacher of War by Lucy Hughes-Hallett – already award-winning and you can see what I thought of the index here.

• The Trip to Echo Spring: Why Writers Drink by Olivia Laing (Canongate) no index in this book according to the table of contents.

So half the books don’t have an index, and one was already an award-winner, I thought Hanns and Rudolf would get it, but The Pike won again.