Women's Prize for Fiction 2013
About the shortlist
For the first time, this year's shortlist includes two previous winners of the Orange Prize; Barbara Kingsolver who won the Orange Prize for Fiction in 2010 for The Lacuna, and Zadie Smith who won in 2006 for On Beauty.
'After an exhilarating meeting, all the judges were in agreement that this is an exceptional year for women's fiction,' commented Miranda Richardson, Chair of Judges. 'The shortlist for 2013 represents six tremendous writers at the top of their game. Their individual novels are flawlessly presented, they contain a heady mix of ideas and without exception take the reader on a unique and deeply satisfying journey.'
Set up in 1996 to celebrate and promote international fiction by women throughout the world to the widest range of readers possible, the Women's Prize for Fiction 2013 is awarded for the best novel of the year written by a woman. Any woman writing in English - whatever her nationality, country of residence, age or subject matter - is eligible.
The winner will be presented with a cheque for £30,000 and a limited edition bronze statue known as 'the Bessie', created by artist Grizel Niven. Both are anonymously endowed.
The award ceremony will take place in The Clore Ballroom, Royal Festival Hall, Southbank Centre, London, on 5 June 2013.
Shortlist
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Where'd You Go, Bernadette
Weidenfeld & Nicolson
Where'd You Go, Bernadette
Maria Semple
Shortlisted, Women's Prize for Fiction
Bernadette Fox is notorious. To Elgie Branch, a Microsoft wunderkind, she's his hilarious, volatile, talented, troubled wife. To fellow mothers at the school gate, she's a menace. To design experts, she's a revolutionary architect. And to 15-year-old Bee, she is a best friend and, quite simply, mum. Then Bernadette disappears. And Bee must take a trip to the end of the earth to find her. Where'd You Go, Bernadette is a compulsively readable, irresistibly written, deeply touching novel about misplaced genius and a mother and daughter's place in the world.
Publisher: Weidenfeld & Nicolson
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Bring Up the Bodies
Fourth Estate
Bring Up the Bodies
Hilary Mantel
Shortlisted, Women's Prize for Fiction
Winner of the Man Booker Prize 2012 With this historic win for Bring Up the Bodies, Hilary Mantel becomes the first British author and the first woman to be awarded two Man Booker Prizes, as well as being the first to win with two consecutive novels. Continuing what began in the Man Booker Prize-winning Wolf Hall, we return to the court of Henry VIII, to witness the irresistible rise of Thomas Cromwell as he contrives the destruction of Anne Boleyn. By 1535 Cromwell is Chief Minister to Henry, his fortunes having risen with those of Anne Boleyn. But the split from the Catholic Church has left England dangerously isolated, and Anne has failed to give the king an heir. Cromwell watches as Henry falls for plain Jane Seymour. Negotiating the politics of the court, Cromwell must find a solution that will satisfy Henry, safeguard the nation and secure his own career. But neither minister nor king will emerge unscathed from the bloody theatre of Anne's final days. An astounding literary accomplishment, Bring Up the Bodies is the story of this most terrifying moment of history, by one of our greatest living novelists.
Publisher: Fourth Estate
Hilary MantelHilary Mantel
Since winning her first Man Booker Prize in 2009 for Wolf Hall Mantel has become one of the UK’s best known authors. Her books include Eight Months on Ghazzah Street (1988); Fludd (1989) winner of the Winifred Holtby Memorial Prize, the Cheltenham Prize and the Southern Arts Literature Prize; A Place of Greater Safety (1992), winner of the Sunday Express Book of the Year award; A Change of Climate (1994); An Experiment in Love (1995), winner of the 1996 Hawthornden Prize. Her memoir, Giving Up the Ghost (2003), was the MIND Book of the Year.
Beyond Black (2005), was shortlisted for a 2006 Commonwealth Writers Prize and for the 2006 Orange Prize for Fiction and longlisted for the Man Booker Prize; Wolf Hall (2009), was winner of the Man Booker Prize and the Walter Scott Prize for Historical Fiction; and Bring Up The Bodies (2012), her most recent novel, was winner of the Man Booker Prize, and Costa Book of the year 2012.
Hilary Mantel was born in Derbyshire, England on 6 July 1952. She studied Law at the London School of Economics and Sheffield University. She was employed as a social worker, and lived in Botswana for five years, followed by four years in Saudi Arabia, before returning to Britain in the mid-1980s.
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Flight Behaviour
Faber & Faber
Flight Behaviour
Barbara Kingsolver
Shortlisted, Women's Prize for Fiction
On the Appalachian Mountains above her home, a young mother discovers a beautiful and terrible marvel of nature. As the world around her is suddenly transformed by a seeming miracle, can the old certainties they have lived by for centuries remain unchallenged? Flight Behaviour is a captivating, topical and deeply human story touching on class, poverty and climate change. It is Barbara Kingsolver's most accessible novel yet, and explores the truths we live by, and the complexities that lie behind them.
Publisher: Faber & Faber
Barbara KingsolverBarbara Kingsolver
American novelist known for her anti-establishment stance, and the winner of the 2010 Orange Prize for Fiction, with The Lacuna...
Barbara Kingsolver was born in Annapolis, Maryland but was raised near Carlisle, Kentucky, 'in the middle of an alfalfa field... between the opulent horse farms and the impoverished coal fields.' Her parents were medical and public-health workers who briefly embarked on an expedition to the Congo when Kingsolver was a child. Kingsolver describes her childhood as a rather solitary one, and used the time she spent by herself to stimulate an 'elaborate life of the mind.'
Kingsolver attended DePauw University in Greencastle, Indiana on a music scholarship, studying classical piano. Eventually, however, she changed her major to biology.In 1986, she won an Arizona Press Club award for outstanding feature writing. Her first novel, The Bean Trees, was published in 1988.
Her subsequent books include The Poisonwood Bible (1998) and Prodigal Summer (2000); a poetry collection, Another America (1992) and the essay collections High Tide in Tucson (1995) and Small Wonder: Essays (2002). The Poisonwood Bible (1998) was a bestseller that won the National Book Prize of South Africa, made finalist for the Pulitzer Prize and PEN/Faulkner award, and was chosen as an Oprah's Book Club selection. In 2000, Barbara was awarded the National Humanities Medal by President Bill Clinton.
She lives with her husband Steven Hopp and their two daughters, Camille and Lily, on a farm in Southwest Virginia. Her book, Animal, Vegetable, Miracle describes their first year on the farm and their quest for self-sufficiency.
www.kingsolver.com -
May We Be Forgiven
Granta
May We Be Forgiven
A M Homes
Shortlisted, Women's Prize for Fiction
Harry is a Richard Nixon scholar who leads a quiet, regular life; his brother George is a high-flying TV producer, with a murderous temper.They have been uneasy rivals since childhood.Then one day George's loses control so extravagantly that he precipitates Harry into an entirely new life. In May We Be Forgiven, Homes gives us a darkly comic look at 21st century domestic life - at individual lives spiraling out of control, bound together by family and history.The cast of characters experience adultery, accidents, divorce, and death. But this is also a savage and dizzyingly inventive vision of contemporary America, whose dark heart Homes penetrates like no other writer - the strange jargons of its language, its passive aggressive institutions, its inhabitants' desperate craving for intimacy and their pushing it away with litigation, technology, paranoia. At the novel's heart are the spaces in between, where the modern family comes together to re-form itself. May We Be Forgiven explores contemporary orphans losing and finding themselves anew; and it speaks above all to the power of personal transformation - simultaneously terrifying and inspiring.
Publisher: Granta
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Life After Life
Doubleday
Life After Life
Kate Atkinson
Shortlisted, Women's Prize for Fiction
What if you had the chance to live your life again and again, until you finally got it right? During a snowstorm in England in 1910, a baby is born and dies before she can take her first breath. During a snowstorm in England in 1910, the same baby is born and lives to tell the tale. What if there were second chances? And third chances? In fact an infinite number of chances to live your life? Would you eventually be able to save the world from its own inevitable destiny? And would you even want to? Life After Life follows Ursula Todd as she lives through the turbulent events of the last century again and again. With wit and compassion, Kate Atkinson finds warmth even in life's bleakest moments, and shows an extraordinary ability to evoke the past. Here she is at her most profound and inventive, in a novel that celebrates the best and worst of ourselves.
Publisher: Doubleday
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NW
Hamish Hamilton
NW
Zadie Smith
Shortlisted, Women's Prize for Fiction
NW is Zadie Smith's masterful novel about London life. Zadie Smith's brilliant tragi-comic NW follows four Londoners - Leah, Natalie, Felix and Nathan - after they've left their childhood council estate, grown up and moved on to different lives. From private houses to public parks, at work and at play, their city is brutal, beautiful and complicated. Yet after a chance encounter they each find that the choices they've made, the people they once were and are now, can suddenly, rapidly unravel. A portrait of modern urban life, NW is funny, sad and urgent - as brimming with vitality as the city itself.
Publisher: Hamish Hamilton
Longlist
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A Trick I Learned from Dead Men
Jonathan Cape
A Trick I Learned from Dead Men
Kitty Aldridge
Longlisted, Women's Prize for Fiction
After the disappearance of their father and the sudden death of their mother, Lee Hart and his deaf brother, Ned, imagine all is lost until Lee lands a traineeship at their local funeral home and discovers there is life after death. Here, in the company of a crooning ex-publican, a closet pole vaulter, a terminally-ill hearse driver, and the dead of their local town, old wounds begin to heal and love arrives as a beautiful florist aboard a 'Fleurtations' delivery van. But death is closer than Lee Hart thinks. Somewhere among the quiet lanes and sleepy farms something else is waiting. And it is closing in. Don't bring your work home with you, that's what they say. Too late. Sometimes sad, often hilarious and ultimately tragic and deeply moving, "A Trick I Learned from Dead Men is a pitch perfect small masterpiece from a writer described by Richard Ford as having 'a moral grasp upon life that is grave, knowing, melancholy, often extremely funny and ultimately optimistic'.
Publisher: Jonathan Cape
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Life After Life
Doubleday
Life After Life
Kate Atkinson
Longlisted, Women's Prize for Fiction
What if you had the chance to live your life again and again, until you finally got it right? During a snowstorm in England in 1910, a baby is born and dies before she can take her first breath. During a snowstorm in England in 1910, the same baby is born and lives to tell the tale. What if there were second chances? And third chances? In fact an infinite number of chances to live your life? Would you eventually be able to save the world from its own inevitable destiny? And would you even want to? Life After Life follows Ursula Todd as she lives through the turbulent events of the last century again and again. With wit and compassion, Kate Atkinson finds warmth even in life's bleakest moments, and shows an extraordinary ability to evoke the past. Here she is at her most profound and inventive, in a novel that celebrates the best and worst of ourselves.
Publisher: Doubleday
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The Marlowe Papers
Sceptre
The Marlowe Papers
Ros Barber
Longlisted, Women's Prize for Fiction
On 30 May 1593, a celebrated young playwright was killed in a tavern brawl in London. That, at least, was the official version. Now Christopher Marlowe reveals the truth: that his 'death' was an elaborate ruse to avoid being convicted of heresy; that he was spirited across the Channel to live on in lonely exile; that he continued to write plays and poetry, hiding behind the name of a colourless man from Stratford - one William Shakespeare. With the grip of a thriller and the emotional force of a sonnet, this remarkable novel in verse gives voice to a man who was brilliant, passionate and mercurial. A cobbler's son who counted nobles among his friends, a spy in the Queen's service, a fickle lover and a declared religious sceptic, he was always courting trouble. Memoir, love letter, confession, settling of accounts and a cry for recognition as the creator of some of the most sublime works in the English language, The Marlowe Papers brings Christopher Marlowe and his era to vivid life. Written by a poet and scholar, it is a work of exceptional art, erudition and imagination.
Publisher: Sceptre
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The People of Forever Are Not Afraid
Hogarth Press
The People of Forever Are Not Afraid
Shani Boianjiu
Longlisted, Women's Prize for Fiction
Lea, Avishag and Yael are school friends in a small town in northern Israel. During dull lessons they play the game Exquisite Corpse and daydream about the boys they fancy. When they hit eighteen they are conscripted into the army. Stuck on checkpoint duty with fellow soldiers she hates, Lea relieves her boredom by creating an imaginary family life for a dishevelled Palestinian man that passes every day; Yael takes to sleeping with a boy she is training, in between breaking up and getting back together with her boyfriend at home; and Avishag's days are spent guarding the Egyptian border, catching smugglers and watching Sudanese refugees throw themselves on the barbed wire fence. They wait in the dust for something to happen, caught in that single, intense second before danger erupts.
Publisher: Hogarth Press
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Gone Girl
Weidenfeld & Nicolson
Gone Girl
Gillian Flynn
Longlisted, Women's Prize for Fiction
'What are you thinking, Amy?' The question I've asked most often during our marriage, if not out loud, if not to the person who could answer. I suppose these questions stormcloud over every marriage: 'What are you thinking? How are you feeling? Who are you? What have we done to each other? What will we do?' Just how well can you ever know the person you love? This is the question that Nick Dunne must ask himself on the morning of his fifth wedding anniversary when his wife Amy suddenly disappears. The police immediately suspect Nick. Amy's friends reveal that she was afraid of him, that she kept secrets from him. He swears it isn't true. A police examination of his computer shows strange searches. He says they aren't his. And then there are the persistent calls on his mobile phone. So what really did happen to Nick's beautiful wife? And what was in that half-wrapped box left so casually on their marital bed? In this novel, marriage truly is the art of war...
Publisher: Weidenfeld & Nicolson
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How Should A Person Be?
Harvill Secker
How Should A Person Be?
Sheila Heti
Longlisted, Women's Prize for Fiction
Reeling from a failed marriage, Sheila, a twenty something playwright, finds herself unsure of how to live and create. When Margaux, a talented painter and free spirit, and Israel, a sexy and depraved artist, enter her life, Sheila hopes that through close-sometimes too close-observation of her new friend, her new lover, and herself, she might regain her footing in art and life. Using transcribed conversations, real emails, plus heavy doses of fiction, the brilliant and always innovative Sheila Heti crafts a work that is part literary novel, part self-help manual, and part bawdy confessional. It's a totally shameless and dynamic exploration into the way we live now, which breathes fresh wisdom into the eternal questions: What is the sincerest way to love? What kind of person should you be?
Publisher: Harvill Secker
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May We Be Forgiven
Granta
May We Be Forgiven
A M Homes
Longlisted, Women's Prize for Fiction
Harry is a Richard Nixon scholar who leads a quiet, regular life; his brother George is a high-flying TV producer, with a murderous temper.They have been uneasy rivals since childhood.Then one day George's loses control so extravagantly that he precipitates Harry into an entirely new life. In May We Be Forgiven, Homes gives us a darkly comic look at 21st century domestic life - at individual lives spiraling out of control, bound together by family and history.The cast of characters experience adultery, accidents, divorce, and death. But this is also a savage and dizzyingly inventive vision of contemporary America, whose dark heart Homes penetrates like no other writer - the strange jargons of its language, its passive aggressive institutions, its inhabitants' desperate craving for intimacy and their pushing it away with litigation, technology, paranoia. At the novel's heart are the spaces in between, where the modern family comes together to re-form itself. May We Be Forgiven explores contemporary orphans losing and finding themselves anew; and it speaks above all to the power of personal transformation - simultaneously terrifying and inspiring.
Publisher: Granta
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Flight Behaviour
Faber & Faber
Flight Behaviour
Barbara Kingsolver
Longlisted, Women's Prize for Fiction
On the Appalachian Mountains above her home, a young mother discovers a beautiful and terrible marvel of nature. As the world around her is suddenly transformed by a seeming miracle, can the old certainties they have lived by for centuries remain unchallenged? Flight Behaviour is a captivating, topical and deeply human story touching on class, poverty and climate change. It is Barbara Kingsolver's most accessible novel yet, and explores the truths we live by, and the complexities that lie behind them.
Publisher: Faber & Faber
Barbara KingsolverBarbara Kingsolver
American novelist known for her anti-establishment stance, and the winner of the 2010 Orange Prize for Fiction, with The Lacuna...
Barbara Kingsolver was born in Annapolis, Maryland but was raised near Carlisle, Kentucky, 'in the middle of an alfalfa field... between the opulent horse farms and the impoverished coal fields.' Her parents were medical and public-health workers who briefly embarked on an expedition to the Congo when Kingsolver was a child. Kingsolver describes her childhood as a rather solitary one, and used the time she spent by herself to stimulate an 'elaborate life of the mind.'
Kingsolver attended DePauw University in Greencastle, Indiana on a music scholarship, studying classical piano. Eventually, however, she changed her major to biology.In 1986, she won an Arizona Press Club award for outstanding feature writing. Her first novel, The Bean Trees, was published in 1988.
Her subsequent books include The Poisonwood Bible (1998) and Prodigal Summer (2000); a poetry collection, Another America (1992) and the essay collections High Tide in Tucson (1995) and Small Wonder: Essays (2002). The Poisonwood Bible (1998) was a bestseller that won the National Book Prize of South Africa, made finalist for the Pulitzer Prize and PEN/Faulkner award, and was chosen as an Oprah's Book Club selection. In 2000, Barbara was awarded the National Humanities Medal by President Bill Clinton.
She lives with her husband Steven Hopp and their two daughters, Camille and Lily, on a farm in Southwest Virginia. Her book, Animal, Vegetable, Miracle describes their first year on the farm and their quest for self-sufficiency.
www.kingsolver.com -
The Red Book
Virago
The Red Book
Deborah Copaken Kogan
Longlisted, Women's Prize for Fiction
Can a weekend change your life?
Clover, Addison, Mia and Jane were college roommates until their graduation in 1989. Now, twenty years later, their lives are in free fall. Clover, once a securities broker with Lehman Brothers, living the Manhattan dream, is out of a job, newly married and fretting about her chances of having a baby. Addison's marriage to a novelist with writers' block is as stale as her artistic 'career'. Mia's acting ambitions never got off the ground, and she now stays home with her four children, renovating and acquiring faster than her Hollywood director husband can pay the bills. Jane, once the Paris bureau chief for a newspaper, now the victim of budget cuts, has been blindsided by different sorts of loss. The four friends have kept up with one another via the red book, a class report published every five years, in which alumni write brief updates about their lives. But there's the story we tell the world, and then there's the real story, as the classmates arriving at their twentieth reunion with their families, their histories, their dashed dreams and secret longings, will discover over the course of an epoch-ending, score-settling, unforgettable weekend.
Publisher: Virago
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Bring Up the Bodies
Fourth Estate
Bring Up the Bodies
Hilary Mantel
Longlisted, Women's Prize for Fiction
Winner of the Man Booker Prize 2012 With this historic win for Bring Up the Bodies, Hilary Mantel becomes the first British author and the first woman to be awarded two Man Booker Prizes, as well as being the first to win with two consecutive novels. Continuing what began in the Man Booker Prize-winning Wolf Hall, we return to the court of Henry VIII, to witness the irresistible rise of Thomas Cromwell as he contrives the destruction of Anne Boleyn. By 1535 Cromwell is Chief Minister to Henry, his fortunes having risen with those of Anne Boleyn. But the split from the Catholic Church has left England dangerously isolated, and Anne has failed to give the king an heir. Cromwell watches as Henry falls for plain Jane Seymour. Negotiating the politics of the court, Cromwell must find a solution that will satisfy Henry, safeguard the nation and secure his own career. But neither minister nor king will emerge unscathed from the bloody theatre of Anne's final days. An astounding literary accomplishment, Bring Up the Bodies is the story of this most terrifying moment of history, by one of our greatest living novelists.
Publisher: Fourth Estate
Hilary MantelHilary Mantel
Since winning her first Man Booker Prize in 2009 for Wolf Hall Mantel has become one of the UK’s best known authors. Her books include Eight Months on Ghazzah Street (1988); Fludd (1989) winner of the Winifred Holtby Memorial Prize, the Cheltenham Prize and the Southern Arts Literature Prize; A Place of Greater Safety (1992), winner of the Sunday Express Book of the Year award; A Change of Climate (1994); An Experiment in Love (1995), winner of the 1996 Hawthornden Prize. Her memoir, Giving Up the Ghost (2003), was the MIND Book of the Year.
Beyond Black (2005), was shortlisted for a 2006 Commonwealth Writers Prize and for the 2006 Orange Prize for Fiction and longlisted for the Man Booker Prize; Wolf Hall (2009), was winner of the Man Booker Prize and the Walter Scott Prize for Historical Fiction; and Bring Up The Bodies (2012), her most recent novel, was winner of the Man Booker Prize, and Costa Book of the year 2012.
Hilary Mantel was born in Derbyshire, England on 6 July 1952. She studied Law at the London School of Economics and Sheffield University. She was employed as a social worker, and lived in Botswana for five years, followed by four years in Saudi Arabia, before returning to Britain in the mid-1980s.
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Lamb
Hutchinson
Lamb
Bonnie Nadzam
Longlisted, Women's Prize for Fiction
'She was coming toward him in a crooked purple tube top and baggy shorts and brassy sandals studded with rhinestones. She carried a huge pink patent-leather purse and was possibly the worst thing he'd seen all day. 'Hi.' She had a little gap between her teeth, and her eyes were wide set, and she had one of those noses with perfectly round nostrils. She was a pale little freckled pig with eyelashes. 'I'm supposed to ask you for a cigarette.' This ugly kid before Lamb was obviously the brunt of a joke. Stupid. And reckless. Had they any idea who he was? Why he was standing alone in a black suit? What kind of heart, if any, hung inside him And how was this not a joke on him? He took a pull on his own cigarette and put it out on the bottom of his beautifully polished shoe.' Tommie is eleven. Lamb is a middle-aged man. He is convinced that he can help her avoid a destiny of apathy and emptiness. He even comes to believe that his devotion is in her best interest.
Publisher: Hutchinson
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The Forrests
Bloomsbury Circus
The Forrests
Emily Perkins
Longlisted, Women's Prize for Fiction
Dorothy Forrest is immersed in the sensory world around her; she lives in the flickering moment. From the age of seven, when her odd, disenfranchised family moves from New York City to the wide skies of Auckland, to the very end of her life, this is her great gift and possible misfortune. Through the wilderness of a commune, to falling in love, to early marriage and motherhood, from the glorious anguish of parenting to the loss of everything worked for and the unexpected return of love, Dorothy is swept along by time. Her family looms and recedes; revelations come to light; death changes everything, but somehow life remains as potent as it ever was, and the joy in just being won't let her go. In a narrative that shifts and moves, growing as wild as the characters, The Forrests is an extraordinary literary achievement. A novel that sings with colour and memory, it speaks of family and time, dysfunction, ageing and loneliness, about heat, youth, and how life can change if 'you're lucky enough to be around for it'.
Publisher: Bloomsbury Circus
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Ignorance
Bloomsbury
Ignorance
Michèle Roberts
Longlisted, Women's Prize for Fiction
After every war there are stories that are locked away like bluebottles in drawers and kept silent. But sometimes the past can return: in the smell of carbolic soap, in whispers darting through a village after mass, in the colour of an undelivered letter. Jeanne Nerin and Marie-Angele Baudry grow up, side by side yet apart, in the village of Ste Madeleine. Marie-Angele is the daughter of the grocer, inflated with ideas of her own piety and rightful place in society. Jeanne's mother washes clothes for a living. She used to be a Jew until this became too dangerous. Jeanne does not think twice about grasping the slender chances life throws at her. Marie-Angele does not grasp; she aspires to a future of comfort and influence. When war falls out of the sky, along with it tumbles a new, grown-up world. The village must think on its feet, play its part in a game for which no one knows the rules. Not even the dubious hero with 'business contacts' who sweeps Marie-Angele off her feet. Not even the reclusive artist living alone with his sensual, red canvases. In these uncertain times, the enemy may be hiding in your garden shed and the truth is all too easily buried under a pyramid of recriminations. Michele Roberts's new novel is a mesmerising exploration of guilt, faith, desire and judgment, bringing to life a people at war in a way that is at once lyrical and shocking.
Publisher: Bloomsbury
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The Innocents
Chatto & Windus
The Innocents
Francesca Segal
Longlisted, Women's Prize for Fiction
Winner of The Costa First Novel Award 2012. What if everything you'd ever wanted was no longer enough? Adam and Rachel are getting married at last. Childhood sweethearts whose lives and families have been intertwined for years; theirs is set to be the wedding of the year. But then Rachel's cousin Ellie makes an unexpected return to the family fold. Beautiful, reckless and troubled, Ellie represents everything that Adam has tried all his life to avoid - and everything that is missing from his world. As the long-awaited wedding approaches, Adam is torn between duty and temptation, security and freedom, and must make a choice that will break either one heart, or many. 'Wonderful ...witty an astonishingly accomplished debut which will draw comparisons between Segal and Zadie Smith and Monica Ali.'
Publisher: Chatto & Windus
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Where'd You Go, Bernadette
Weidenfeld & Nicolson
Where'd You Go, Bernadette
Maria Semple
Longlisted, Women's Prize for Fiction
Bernadette Fox is notorious. To Elgie Branch, a Microsoft wunderkind, she's his hilarious, volatile, talented, troubled wife. To fellow mothers at the school gate, she's a menace. To design experts, she's a revolutionary architect. And to 15-year-old Bee, she is a best friend and, quite simply, mum. Then Bernadette disappears. And Bee must take a trip to the end of the earth to find her. Where'd You Go, Bernadette is a compulsively readable, irresistibly written, deeply touching novel about misplaced genius and a mother and daughter's place in the world.
Publisher: Weidenfeld & Nicolson
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Honour
Viking
Honour
Elif Shafak
Longlisted, Women's Prize for Fiction
From the Orange Prize long-listed and award-winning author of The Forty Rules of Love and The Bastard of Istanbul Elif Shafak, Honour is a novel of love, betrayal and a clash of cultures. 'My mother died twice. I promised myself I would not let her story be forgotten...' Leaving her twin sister behind, Pembe leaves Turkey for love - following her husband Adem to London. There the Topraks hope to make new lives for themselves and their children. Yet, no matter how far they travel, the traditions and beliefs the Topraks left behind stay with them - carried in the blood. Their eldest is the boy Iskender, who remembers Turkey and feels betrayal deeper than most. His sister is Esma, who is loyal and true despite the pain and heartache. And, lastly, Yunus, who was born in London, and is shy and different. Trapped by the mistakes of the past, the Toprak children find their lives shattered and transformed by a brutal act of murder... A powerful novel set in Turkey and London in the 1970s, Honour explores pain and loss, loyalty and betrayal, the trials of the immigrant, the clash of tradition and modernity, as well as the love and heartbreak that too often tears families apart. "
Publisher: Viking
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NW
Hamish Hamilton
NW
Zadie Smith
Longlisted, Women's Prize for Fiction
NW is Zadie Smith's masterful novel about London life. Zadie Smith's brilliant tragi-comic NW follows four Londoners - Leah, Natalie, Felix and Nathan - after they've left their childhood council estate, grown up and moved on to different lives. From private houses to public parks, at work and at play, their city is brutal, beautiful and complicated. Yet after a chance encounter they each find that the choices they've made, the people they once were and are now, can suddenly, rapidly unravel. A portrait of modern urban life, NW is funny, sad and urgent - as brimming with vitality as the city itself.
Publisher: Hamish Hamilton
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The Light Between Oceans
Doubleday
The Light Between Oceans
M L Stedman
Longlisted, Women's Prize for Fiction
Tom Sherbourne, released from the horrors of the First World War, is now a lighthouse keeper, cocooned on a remote island with his young wife Izzy, who is content in everything but her failure to have a child. One April morning, a boat washes ashore carrying a dead man - and a crying baby. Safe from the real world, Tom and Izzy break the rules and follow their hearts. It is a decision with devastating consequences.
Publisher: Doubleday
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Mateship with Birds
Picador
Mateship with Birds
Carrie Tiffany
Longlisted, Women's Prize for Fiction
Mateship n. the quality or state of being a mate; esp: fellowship
On the outskirts of a country town in the early 1950s, a lonely farmer trains his binoculars on a raucous family of kookaburras roosting next to his dairy. As Harry observes the birds through a year of feast, famine, birth, death, war, romance and song, his neighbour, Betty, has her own set of binoculars trained on him. Betty's son, Michael, gravitates to the gentle man next door, and Harry, sensing Michael is ready to stretch his wings, decides to teach him about sex. Harry knows everything about the land. But what does he know about women? Mateship with Birds is a tender, witty novel of young lust and mature love. A glorious tale of innocence lost, it celebrates life on one small farm in a vast ancient landscape, as a collection of misfits question what a family might be.
Publisher: Picador
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Alif the Unseen
Corvus
Alif the Unseen
G Willow Wilson
Longlisted, Women's Prize for Fiction
'I will tell you a story, but it comes with a warning; when you hear it, you will become someone else.' He calls himself Alif - few people know his real name - a young man born in a Middle Eastern city that straddles the ancient and modern worlds. When Alif meets the aristocratic Intisar, he believes he has found love. But their relationship has no future - Intisar is promised to another man and her family's honour must be satisfied. As a remembrance, Intisar sends the heartbroken Alif a mysterious book. Entitled The Thousand and One Days, Alif discovers that this parting gift is a door to another world - a world from a very different time, when old magic was in the ascendant and the djinn walked amongst us. With the book in his hands, Alif finds himself drawing attention - far too much attention - from both men and djinn. Thus begins an adventure that takes him through the crumbling streets of a once-beautiful city, to uncover the long-forgotten mysteries of the Unseen. Alif is about to become a fugitive in both the corporeal and incorporeal worlds. And he is about to unleash a destructive power that will change everything and everyone - starting with Alif himself.
Publisher: Corvus
Miranda Richardson, Chair of Judges commented: 'The task of reducing the list of submissions from over 140 to just 20 books was always going to be daunting, but this year's infinite variety has made the task even trickier. The list we have ended up with is, we believe, truly representative of that diversity of style, content and provenance, and contains those works which genuinely inspired the most excitement and passion amongst the judges. I don't anticipate the job becoming easier at the next stage!'
Judges
Also announced is this year's judging panel...
The Oscar-nominated actress Miranda Richardson will chair a panel of judges comprising authors, journalists and critics.
Chair of judges, Miranda Richardson commented:
This is a new departure for me and I am honoured to be working with judges who combine fine minds with, I suspect, great good humour. I look forward to sharing with them the delights of finding new insights into our existence, through the unique voices of the women entering this year's competition. It will be rigorous, and hopefully, fun. It is an exciting responsibility and I very much look forward to beginning the journey.
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Razia IqbalBBC broadcaster, journalistCurrently, Razia Iqbal works as a Special correspondent and Presenter for BBC news; she is one of the main presenters of BBC World Service's flag ship current affairs programme, Newshour.
She also presents Talking Books for BBC World TV and the BBC news channel which is a half hour interview programme with leading writers, and documentaries and interview programmes on Radio 4 and World Service. Before that she was the BBC Arts Correspondent for seven years.
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Rachel JohnsonAuthor, editor and journalistRachel Johnson is the author of three novels, Notting Hell, Shire Hell and Winter Games, and two volumes of diaries, The Mummy Diaries and A Diary of the Lady. She has also written for national newspapers since the age of 23, when she joined the staff of the Financial Times, and worked for the BBC. She edited the Lady magazine from 2009-2012.
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Jojo MoyesAuthorJojo Moyes is the author of ten novels. Her last, Me Before You, sold more than 400,000 copies and has been translated into 28 languages. She has won the RNA novel of the year award twice, most recently with The Last Letter From Your Lover. She writes regularly for The Daily Telegraph and other publications, and lives on a farm in Essex with her husband and three children.
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Miranda RichardsonActorMiranda is chair of judges for this year's Prize
Miranda trained at the Bristol Old Vic Theatre School and subsequently performed in plays by Terry Johnson, Edward Albee, David Mamet, Harold Pinter Wallace Shawn and Sam Shepard.
She made her first impression on film audiences with Mike Newell’s Dance With A Stranger, and has appeared in many films, notably Neil Jordan’s The Crying Game, Mike Newell’s Enchanted April and Christopher Menaul’s Fatherland, for both of which she received a Golden Globe Award, Robert Altman’s Kansas City, Robert Duvall’s The Apostle, Louis Malle’s Damage which earned her both an Oscar nomination and a BAFTA award and Tom and Viv, her portrayal as T S Eliot’s wife earning her another Oscar nomination.
Other films include Sleepy Hollow, The Hours, Spider, Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire (again with Mike Newell), Nicolas Roeg’s Puffball, Young Victoria and she was nominated for a BAFTA for her performance as Barbara Castle in Made in Dagenham.
She is well known for her portrayal as Queenie in the television series “Blackadder” and more recently for Stephen Poliakoff’s “The Lost Prince” and “Gideon’s Daughter” and Ford Madox Ford’s “Parade’s End”.
Miranda is an Ambassador for WWF.
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Natasha WalterWriter and human rights activistNatasha Walter was born in London in 1967. She read English at St John's College, Cambridge University, and then went to Harvard as a graduate student. Her first job was at Vogue magazine, she subsequently worked as a reviewer, columnist and feature writer at the Independent, the Observer and the Guardian.
Her first book, The New Feminism, was published in 1998 and her second book, Living Dolls: The Return of Sexism, in 2010. She is a passionate advocate for the rights of women and children who seek asylum, and in 2006 she founded the charity Women for Refugee Women, where she is now the director. She lives in London with her partner and their daughter and son.
About the Women's Prize for Fiction 2013
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