Which statement accurately represents the connection between 'Heart: A…

Concept. A claim linking a book to a literary award is settled first by the award category's eligibility rules, and those rules turn on genre before they turn on quality or subject matter. The Edgar Allan Poe Awards — the “Edgars” — are given each year by the Mystery Writers of America (MWA) for work in the crime and mystery field. Within them, Best Novel is reserved for book-length works of crime fiction; crime writing that is factual is judged in a separate category, Best Fact Crime. So a title that is not a novel cannot be nominated for, or win, Best Novel at all — the question is one of eligibility, not of merit.

Application. ‘Heart: A History’ (2018) is by Sandeep Jauhar, a practising cardiologist. It is a work of non-fiction: it traces the history of cardiology — early attempts to reach and repair the human heart, Werner Forssmann’s self-catheterisation, the arrival of the heart–lung machine, open-heart surgery, the pacemaker and the implantable defibrillator — and interleaves that history with the author’s account of his own family’s record of heart disease and his own cardiac scare. The result is history plus memoir, told about real people and real events. It is therefore not a novel, so it falls outside what Best Novel draws from, and it was neither shortlisted for nor a winner of that award.

Cross-check by value. Test each claim against that one classification:

• ‘Nominated for Edgar Award for blending medical history and mystery’ and the two claims of a win — ‘as pioneering medical fiction’ and ‘for fictional cardiac surgery’ — all presuppose a work of fiction competing in Best Novel; the book is not fiction, and it appears on no Edgar shortlist or winners list.

• ‘Non-fiction memoir, ineligible for Edgar Award’ states the classification the book actually carries and the consequence that follows from the Best Novel rules.

Where the book was actually recognised. ‘Heart: A History’ was shortlisted for the 2019 Wellcome Book Prize, an award for books that engage with medicine, health and the human body and which is open to non-fiction — recognition consistent with its classification, and a different prize from the Edgars.