Guy Stagg’s The Crossway (Picador), an account of how he walked from Canterbury to Jerusalem in an attempt to “mend” himself after mental illness, was among eight books short-listed this week for the £30,000 Rathbones Folio Prize (for “works of literature in which the subjects being explored achieve their most perfect and thrilling expression”). Also short-listed was Mary Ann Sate, Imbecile by Alice Jolly (Unbound), which, in common with The Crossway, has been long-listed for the RSL Ondaatje Prize, for a working “evoking the spirit of a place”.