Longlist

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  The Household Guide to Dying

  Debra Adelaide

  HarperCollins
  

  The Household Guide to Dying

  Debra Adelaide

  Longlisted, Orange Prize for Fiction

  A brilliantly moving and darkly comic novel, which charts the attempts of dying heroine Delia -- a modern day Mrs Beeton -- to prepare her family for the future and lay to rest a ghost from her past. Inspired by her heroine, Isabella Beeton, Delia has made a living writing a series of hugely successful modern household guides, as well as an acerbic domestic advice column. As the book opens, she is not yet forty, but has only a short time to live. She is preoccupied with how to prepare herself and her family for death, from writing exhaustive lists to teaching her young daughters how to make a perfect cup of tea. What she needs, more than anything, is a manual -- exactly the kind she is the expert at writing. Realising this could be her greatest achievement (for who could be better equipped to write The Household Guide to Dying?) she sets to work. But, in the writing, Delia is forced to confront the ghosts of her past, and the events of fourteen years previously. There is a journey she needs to make, back to the landscape of her past, and one last vital thing she needs to do.Hugely original, life affirming and humorous, The Household Guide to Dying illuminates love, loss, family and the place we call home.

  Publisher: HarperCollins

  Debra Adelaide

  Debra Adelaide is a Sydney-based author. Her recent novel, The Household Guide to Dying, has been a worldwide success, having been published so far in Australia, the United Kingdom, New Zealand, France, Germany, the Netherlands, Brazil, Spain, Portugal, China, Italy and Poland. In 2009 the novel was longlisted for the prestigious Orange Prize for fiction, along with 19 other novels by women from around the world. In Australia, it was recently shortlisted for the inaugural Randwick Literary Award, along with Peter Carey's Parrot and Olivier in America, J M Coetzee's Summertime and Tim Winton's Breath.

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  Girl in a Blue Dress

  Gaynor Arnold

  Tindal Street Press
  

  Girl in a Blue Dress

  Gaynor Arnold

  Longlisted, Orange Prize for Fiction

  In Alfred Gibson the fierce energy and brilliance of the most famous of the Victorian novelists is recreated, in a heart-warming story of first love--of a cocky young writer smitten by a pretty girl in a blue dress.

   

  Alfred Gibson's funeral has taken place at Westminster Abbey, and his wife of twenty years, Dorothea, has not been invited. Her younger daughter Kitty comforts her, until an invitation for a private audience with Queen Victoria arrives, and she begins to examine her own life more closely. Uncovering the true deviousness and hypnotic power of her celebrity author husband, she'll now need to face her grown-up children--and worse--her redoubtable younger sister, Sissy and the charming actress, Miss Ricketts.

  Publisher: Tindal Street Press

  Gaynor Arnold

  Gaynor Arnold was born and raised in Cardiff.  She read English at St. Hilda's College, Oxford, and acted in numerous plays while an undergraduate, notably at the Edinburgh Festival and in the USA.  She's been a social worker for 40 years and currently works for Birmingham city council's Adoption and Fostering Service. Gaynor has written stories since her early childhood and has a particular fascination with the life and work of Charles Dickens.  Several of her short stories have been published in anthologies and literary magazines and she is a member of a writers' group.  Girl in a Blue Dress is her first published novel and has been long listed for the 2008 Man Booker Prize and the 2009 Orange Prize for Fiction.  She currently lives in Birmingham and is married with two grown-up children.

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  The Lost Dog

  Michelle de Kretser

  Vintage
  

  The Lost Dog

  Michelle de Kretser

  Longlisted, Orange Prize for Fiction

  Tom Loxley is holed up in a remote cottage in the bush, trying to finish a book on Henry James and the Uncanny when his dog goes missing, trailing a length of orange twine, tied with firm knots. Tom's lonely childhood in India taught him to tie knots but not to hold on ...The house belongs to Nelly Zhang, an elusive artist with whom Tom has become enthralled. The narrative spans ten days while Tom searches for his dog ...and loops back in time to take the reader on a breathtaking journey into glittering worlds far beyond the present tragedy, from an Anglo-Indian childhood to the brittle contemporary Melbourne art scene, from Tom's scratchy, unbearably poignant relationship with his ailing mother to the unanswered puzzles in Nelly's past - her husband also disappeared in the bush. And the reader fears for Tom as well as for the dog. Set in present-day Australia and mid-20th century India, here is a haunting, layered work that vividly counterpoints new cityscapes and their inhabitants with the untamed continent beyond. With its atmosphere of menace and an acute sense of the unexplained in any story, it illuminates the collision of the wild and the civilised, modernity and the past, home and exile. The Lost Dog is a mystery and a love story, an exploration of art and nature, a meditation on ageing and the passage of time. It is a book of wonders: a gripping contemporary novel which examines the weight of history as well as different ways of trying to grasp the world.

  Publisher: Vintage

  Michelle de Kretser

   

   

  Michelle de Kretser was born in Sri Lanka and migrated to Australia with her family in 1972. She has taught English at the University of Melbourne, as well as working as an editor and book reviewer. Her novels, The Rose Grower (1999) and The Hamilton Case (2003), have been published across the world and translated into several languages. The Hamilton Case was awarded the Commonwealth Writers' Prize for South-East Asia and the Pacific, the Encore Award and the Tasmania Pacific Prize for Australian and New Zealand fiction. Her most recent novel, The Lost Dog, was longlisted for the Booker Prize 2008. She lives in Melbourne.

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  Their Finest Hour and a Half

  Lissa Evans

  Black Swan
  

  Their Finest Hour and a Half

  Lissa Evans

  Longlisted, Orange Prize for Fiction

  In 1940, every draft of every film script had to be approved by the Ministry of Information. Cast and crew were waiting to be called up at any moment, travel was restricted and filming was interrupted by regular bombing raids. And so it is that we find a disparate group of characters whose paths would never have crossed in peacetime: Ambrose Hilliard, a washed up old ham from the golden era of silent movies; Catrin Cole, formerly an advertising copywriter drafted in to 'write women' for the Ministry of Information; Edith Beadmore, a wardrobe assistant at Madame Tussauds; and, Arthur Frith, peacetime catering manager turned wartime Special Military Advisor. This distinct group find themselves thrown together in the wilds of Norfolk to 'do their bit' on the latest propaganda film - a heart-warming tale of derring do, of two sisters who set out in a leaking old wooden boat to rescue the brave men trapped at Dunkirk. All completely fabricated, of course, but what does that matter when the nation's morale is at stake? Newly crowned actor, script-writer, costumier and military attache must swallow their mutual distaste, ill-will and mistrust and unite for the common good, for King and country, and - in one case - for better or worse.

  Publisher: Black Swan

  

  Photo: Doubleday

  Lissa Evans

  After qualifying as a doctor in 1983, Lissa Evans worked in medicine in Newcastle for a couple of years before a brief period in standup. She joined BBC Radio where she was a radio producer of comedy programmes before migrating to television. Evans has worked on shows such as  Father Ted (for which she won a BAFTA for best comedy),  Room 101, The Kumars at No. 42, TV Heaven, Telly Hell, News Knight with Sir Trevor McDonald and Crossing the Floor (for which she won an Emmy for best drama).
  
  Lissa Evans has also written a number of books with hints of humour such as Odd One Out, Their Finest Hour And A Half Spencer's List and Small Change For Stuart, a children's novel.

   

   

   

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  Blonde Roots

  Bernadine Evaristo

  Hamish Hamilton
  

  Blonde Roots

  Bernadine Evaristo

  Longlisted, Orange Prize for Fiction

  Welcome to a world turned upside down. One minute, Doris, from England, is playing hide-and-seek with her sisters in the fields behind their cottage. The next, someone puts a bag over her head and she ends up in the hold of a slave-ship sailing to the New World ...In this fantastically imaginative inversion of the transatlantic slave trade - in which 'whytes' are enslaved by black people - Bernardine Evaristo has created a thought-provoking satire that is as accessible and readable as it is intelligent and insightful. Blonde Roots brings the shackles and cries of long-ago barbarity uncomfortably close and raises timely questions about the society of today.

  Publisher: Hamish Hamilton

  Bernadine Evaristo

   

  Bernardine Evaristo is the author of three novels, Lara, The Emperor's Babe and Soul Tourists, all of which fuse fiction with poetry. Blonde Roots is her first prose novel. She was made a Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature in 2004 and the Royal Society of Arts in 2006. She lives in London.

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  Scottsboro: A Novel

  Ellen Feldman

  Picador
  

  Scottsboro: A Novel

  Ellen Feldman

  Longlisted, Orange Prize for Fiction

  Alabama, 1931. A posse stops a freight train and arrests nine black youths. Their crime: fighting with white boys. Then two white girls emerge from another freight car, and within seconds the cry of rape goes up. One of the girls sticks to her story. The other changes her tune, again and again. A young journalist, whose only connection to the incident is her overheated social conscience, fights to save the nine youths from the electric chair, redeem the girl who repents her lie, and make amends for her own past. Stirring racism, sexism, and anti-Semitism into an explosive brew, Scottsboro is a novel of a shocking injustice that reverberated around the world.

  Publisher: Picador

  Ellen Feldman

  Ellen Feldman lives in New York with her husband and works as a journalist and critic. She is the author of The Boy Who Loved Anne Frank and Scottsboro.

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  Strange Music

  Laura Fish

  Vintage
  

  Strange Music

  Laura Fish

  Longlisted, Orange Prize for Fiction

  In Laura Fish's ambitious and captivating novel, three very different women struggle for freedom. While Elizabeth Barrett Browning is confined to bed, chafing against the restriction of her doctors and writing poetry and fretful letters, at her family's Jamaican estate Kaydia, the Creole housekeeper tries to protect her daughter from their predatory master and a recently freed black slave, Sheba, mourns the loss of her lover. As Elizabeth, a passionate abolitionist, struggles to come to terms with the source of her wealth and privilege both Sheba and Kydia fight to escape a tragic past which seems ever present. The resulting novel is an extraordinary evocation of the dark side of the nineteenth-century that is both horrifying and ultimately redeeming.

  Publisher: Vintage

  Laura Fish

   

  Laura Fish was born in London in 1964, of Caribbean parents. She has lived in Southern Africa and Australia, and has held posts as a Creative Writing tutor at various universities including the University of East Anglia, where she recently completed a PhD in Creative and Critical Writing. She holds the RCUK Academic Fellowship in Creative Writing at Newcastle University. Her first novel, Flight of Black Swans, was published in 1995.

• Love Marriage

  V V Ganeshananthan

  Wiedenfeld & Nicolson

  Love Marriage

  V V Ganeshananthan

  Longlisted, Orange Prize for Fiction

  In this globe-scattered Sri Lankan family, we speak only of two kinds of marriage. The first is the Arranged Marriage. The second is the Love Marriage. In reality, there is a whole spectrum in between, but most of us spend years running away from the first towards the second. 'Among the categories that bleed outside these two carefully delineated boundaries: the Self-Arranged Marriage, the Outside Marriage, the Cousin Marriage, the Village Marriage, the Marriage Abroad. there is the Marriage Without Consent. There is the Marriage Under Pressure. There is even Marrying the Enemy, who, it turns out, is not the Enemy at all.' Reverse a family tree and branches of blood are whittled down to one person - in this case, the young female narrator, Yalini - composed of all the women and men who came before her; the result of many marriages. Parents want nothing more than to prevent their children from colliding with inevitability: that in a different world, there is a different kind of marriage.Yet Tamil and Sinhalese parents - particularly after the great ethnic violence in Sri Lanka in 1983 - watch helplessly as their children cut themselves free of the need to please their ancestors. nThey walked out of the country to give their children opportunity, but this was not the opportunity they intended them to take: Western marriage. 'We live by our own wits, our own hearts, and our own histories; there is no other way to survive here, and some have learned to love people who do not worship our gods, eat our food, share our blood.' For Yalini and her generation, they are the children of their parents, but have entered other countries in which the rules of marriage - Love Marriage, Arranged Marriage, and all that lies in between - dramatically do not apply.

  Publisher: Wiedenfeld & Nicolson

  V V Ganeshananthan

  V V Ganeshananthan, a fiction writer and journalist, lives in New York. She is a 2002 graduate of Harvard College. In 2005, she received an MFA in fiction from the Iowa Writers' Workshop, and in 2005-2006, she was the Bennett Fellow and writer-in-residence at Phillips Exeter Academy.

   

  In 2007, she graduated from the new MA program at the Columbia Graduate School of Journalism, where she was a Bollinger Fellow specialising in Arts and Culture journalism. She has written and reported for The Atlantic Monthly, The Washington Post, The Wall Street Journal, The Chronicle of Higher Education, Sepia Mutiny, and The American Prospect, among others. She is the vice president of the South Asian Journalists Association and a member of the graduate board of The Harvard Crimson. This autumn she is to be writer-in-residence at Skidmore College. Love Marriage is her first novel.

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  Intuition

  Allegra Goodman

  Atlantic
  

  Intuition

  Allegra Goodman

  Longlisted, Orange Prize for Fiction

  Allegra Goodman's brilliantly original bestseller Intuition is a maginficently dramatic character-driven novel, at once an intricate mystery and a rich human drama in the tradition of "The Corrections". A charismatic doctor and a rigorous scientist are co-directors of a cancer research lab. They demand nothing less than complete dedication and obedience from their young proteges. In this high-pressure setting, one young man's experiments begin to show exciting results. At first the entire lab is giddy with expectation. But his colleagues become suspicious, and soon an all-too-public controversy engulfs the lab and everyone in it..."Intuition" is a rich and compelling human drama about the quest for 'truth', that asks: who can you trust when you aren't even sure you can trust yourself?

  Publisher: Atlantic

  Allegra Goodman

  Allegra Goodman's fiction has appeared in the New Yorker and Best American Short Stories edited by Salman Rushdie. Her previous books include Kaaterskill Falls (shortlisted for the US National Book Award) and The Family Markowitz. Intuition is her first novel to be published in the UK. She lives with her family in Cambridge, Massachusetts.

• 

  The Wilderness

  Samantha Harvey

  Vintage
  

  The Wilderness

  Samantha Harvey

  Longlisted, Orange Prize for Fiction

  It's Jake's birthday. He is sitting in a small plane, being flown over the landscape that has been the backdrop to his life - his childhood, his marriage, his work, his passions. Now he is in his early sixties, and he isn't quite the man he used to be. He has lost his wife, his son is in prison, and he is about to lose his past. Jake has Alzheimer's. As the disease takes hold of him, Jake struggles to hold on to his personal story, to his memories and identity, but they become increasingly elusive and unreliable. What happened to his daughter? Is she alive, or long dead? And why exactly is his son in prison? What went so wrong in his life? There was a cherry tree once, and a yellow dress, but what exactly do they mean? As Jake, assisted by 'poor Eleanor', a childhood friend with whom for some unfathomable reason he seems to be sleeping, fights the inevitable dying of the light, the key events of his life keep changing as he tries to grasp them, and what until recently seemed solid fact is melting into surreal dreams or nightmarish imaginings. Is there anything he'll be able to salvage from the wreckage? Beauty, perhaps, the memory of love, or nothing at all? From the first sentence to the last, The Wilderness holds us in its grip. This is writing of extraordinary power and beauty.

  Publisher: Vintage

  Samantha Harvey

  Samantha Harvey was born in England in 1975. She has lived in Ireland, New Zealand and Japan writing, travelling and teaching, and in recent years has co-founded an environmental charity alongside her novel writing. She completed with distinction the Bath Spa Creative Writing MA course in 2005, where she was shortlisted for the PFD prize. The Wilderness is her first novel.

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  The Invention of Everything Else

  Samantha Hunt

  Harvill Secker
  

  The Invention of Everything Else

  Samantha Hunt

  Longlisted, Orange Prize for Fiction

  In The Invention of Everything Else, Samantha Hunt fictionalises the story of the Serbian-born scientist Nikola Tesla, inventor of radio and creator of AC electricity, a notoriously marginalised genius whose wild eccentricities, including obsessive-compulsive disorder and germ-phobia, have made him a counter culture icon, but who faded into obscurity in his final years and died in poverty, suspected of anti-American sentiment. His carelessness about protecting his ideas through patents meant that he was eclipsed in reputation by Thomas Edison and Marconi, both of whom built fortunes by stealing Tesla's ideas.The Invention of Everything Else revolves around the twin poles of the inventor, and Louisa, a highly sensitive and imaginative young woman who encounters Tesla at the end of his life. It is also a novel about a father and a daughter, a love story, a New York story, and a literary mystery. In this meticulously researched and biographically accurate novel, Samantha Hunt weaves these elements into a narrative that is buoyant, engaging, and triumphant. The Invention of Everything Else is a beautiful, moving, and thrilling exploration of human loneliness and isolation and the opposing power of emotional and scientific imagination.

  Publisher: Harvill Secker

  Samantha Hunt

  Samantha Hunt's second novel, The Invention of Everything Else, was shortlisted for the Orange Prize and winner of the Bard Fiction Prize. Her first novel, The Seas, won a National Book Foundation award for writers under thirty-five. Hunt's fiction has been published in The New Yorker and McSweeney's. She lives in New York.

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  Molly Fox's Birthday

  Deirdre Madden

  Faber
  

  Molly Fox's Birthday

  Deirdre Madden

  Longlisted, Orange Prize for Fiction

  Dublin. Midsummer. While absent in New York, the celebrated actor Molly Fox has loaned her house to a playwright friend, who is struggling to write a new work. Over the course of this, the longest day of the year, the playwright reflects upon her own life, Molly's, and that of their mutual friend Andrew, whom she has known since university. Why does Molly never celebrate her own birthday, which falls upon this day? What does it mean to be a playwright or an actor? How have their relationships evolved over the course of many years? Molly Fox's Birthday calls into question the ideas that we hold about who we are; and shows how the past informs the present in ways we might never have imagined.

  Publisher: Faber

  Deirdre Madden

   

  Deirdre Madden is from Toomebridge, Co. Antrim. Her novels include The Birds of the Innocent Wood, Nothing is Black, One by One in the Darkness, which was shortlisted for the Orange Prize, and Authenticity. She teaches at Trinity College Dublin and is a member of the Irish arts academy Aosdána.

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  A Mercy

  Toni Morrison

  Vintage
  

  A Mercy

  Toni Morrison

  Longlisted, Orange Prize for Fiction

  On the day that Jacob, an Anglo-Dutch trader and adventurer, agrees to accept a slave in lieu of payment of a debt from a plantation owner, little Florens' life changes. With her intelligence and passion for wearing the cast-off shoes of her mistress, Florens has never blended into the background and now at the age of eight she is taken from her family to begin a new life. She ends up part of Jacob's household, along with his wife Rebekka, Lina their Native American servant and the strange and melancholy Sorrow who was rescued from a shipwreck. Together these women face the trials of their harsh environment as Jacob attempts to carve out a place for himself in the brutal landscape of the north of America in the seventeenth century.

  Publisher: Vintage

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  The Russian Dreambook of Colour and Light

  Gina Ochsner

  Portobello
  

  The Russian Dreambook of Colour and Light

  Gina Ochsner

  Longlisted, Orange Prize for Fiction

  In her very dusty provincial museum of fake exhibits lovingly crafted from cardboard, wire and glue, Tanya dreams of Russian art's long colors and wonders when Yuri will stop fishing long enough to notice how she adores him, while she tries the zero-one-zero diet in order to meet Aeroflot's maximum waist requirements for trainee cabin-crew. When her boss at the museum gives her the vast responsibility of cultivating some potential benefactors from America, and persuading them to give their money to the very needy All-Russian All-Cosmopolitan City Museum, Tanya finds herself involuntarily enlisting all her neighbors in the scheme. But their shared hopes of riches and dreams of escape start to rot.And the rounded corpse of Mircha in the courtyard refuses to decompose, as the snow turns it into a hill, and its spirit takes flight around the apartments, dispensing more advice than anyone desires, goading the men, annoying the women, in a block where too many mothers and fathers are missing and too many memories lie stagnant on old battlefields.

  Publisher: Portobello

  Gina Ochsner

  Gina Ochsner lives in Oregon and divides her time between writing, teaching, and parenting.  Ochsner is the grateful recipient of a John L. Simon Guggenheim grant and a grant from the National Endowment of Arts.  Her stories have appeared in, Glimmertrain, The Kenyon Review, The New Yorker, and Tin House

   

  She is the author of the short story collection The Necessary Grace to Fall, which received the Flannery O'Connor Award for Short Fiction and the story collection People I Wanted to Be. Both books received the Oregon Book Award .

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  Home

  Marilynne Robinson

  Virago
  

  Home

  Marilynne Robinson

  Longlisted, Orange Prize for Fiction

  Hundreds of thousands of readers were enthralled and delighted by the luminous, tender voice of John Ames in Gilead, Marilynne Robinson's Pulitzer Prize-winning novel. Now comes Home, a deeply affecting novel that takes place in the same period and same Iowa town of Gilead. This is Jack's story. Jack - prodigal son of the Boughton family, godson and namesake of John Ames, gone twenty years - has come home looking for refuge and to try to make peace with a past littered with trouble and pain. A bad boy from childhood, an alcoholic who cannot hold down a job, Jack is perpetually at odds with his surroundings and with his traditionalist father, though he remains Boughton's most beloved child. His sister Glory has also returned to Gilead, fleeing her own mistakes, to care for their dying father. Brilliant, loveable, wayward, Jack forges an intense new bond with Glory and engages painfully with his father and his father's old friend John Ames.

  Publisher: Virago

  

  Marilynne Robinson

  Marilynne Robinson

  Marilynne Robinson was born in 1947 and teaches at the Iowa Writers' Workshop.
  
  Her first novel, Housekeeping, was awarded the PEN/Hemingway Award for the best first novel and named as one of the Observer's 100 greatest novels of all time. It was also nominated for the Pulitzer Prize.
  
  Marilynne Robinson is the author of two works of non-fiction, Mother Country and The Death of Adam.
  
  Gilead, won the 2005 Pulitzer Prize and was longlisted in 2006 for the Orange Broadband Prize for Fiction and her novel Home won the 2009 Orange Prize for Fiction.

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  Evening is the Whole Day

  Preeta Samarasan

  Fourth Estate
  

  Evening is the Whole Day

  Preeta Samarasan

  Longlisted, Orange Prize for Fiction

  Set in Malaysia, this spellbinding, exuberant first novel introduces us to a prosperous Indian immigrant family, as it slowly peels away its closely guarded secrets.When the family's servant girl, Chellam, is dismissed from the big house for unnamed crimes, it is only the latest in a series of losses that have shaken six-year-old Aasha's life. Her grandmother has passed away under mysterious circumstances and her older sister has disappeared for a new life abroad, with no plans to return. Her parents, meanwhile, seem to be hiding something away - from themselves, and from one another. As the novel tells us the story of the years leading up to these events, we learn what has happened to the hopes and dreams of a family caught up in Malaysia's troubled post-colonial history. What bought the Rajasekharan family to the Big House in Malaysia? What was Chellam's unforgivable crime? Why did the eldest daughter leave the country under strained circumstances? What is Appa - the respectable family patriarch - hiding from his wife and his children? Through this vibrant cast of characters, and through a masterful evocation of the clashes and strains in a country where Malays, Indians and Chinese inhabitants vie for their positions in society, Preeta Samarasan brings us an enthralling saga of one household and the world beyond it.

  Publisher: Fourth Estate

  Preeta Samarasan

   

  Preeta Samarasan was born and raised in Malaysia and moved to the United States for her high school education. She received her MFA from the University of Michigan, where an early version of this novel won the Hopwood Novel Award. She recently won the Asian American Writer's Workshop short-story award. She lives in France.

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  Burnt Shadows

  Kamila Shamsie

  Bloomsbury
  

  Burnt Shadows

  Kamila Shamsie

  Longlisted, Orange Prize for Fiction

  In a prison cell in the US, a man stands trembling, naked, fearfully waiting to be shipped to Guantanamo Bay. How did it come to this? he wonders. August 9th, 1945, Nagasaki. Hiroko Tanaka steps out onto her veranda, taking in the view of the terraced slopes leading up to the sky. Wrapped in a kimono with three black cranes swooping across the back, she is twenty-one, in love with the man she is to marry, Konrad Weiss. In a split second, the world turns white. In the next, it explodes with the sound of fire and the horror of realisation. In the numbing aftermath of a bomb that obliterates everything she has known, all that remains are the bird-shaped burns on her back, an indelible reminder of the world she has lost. In search of new beginnings, she travels to Delhi two years later. There she walks into the lives of Konrad's half-sister, Elizabeth, her husband James Burton, and their employee Sajjad Ashraf, from whom she starts to learn Urdu. As the years unravel, new homes replace those left behind and old wars are seamlessly usurped by new conflicts. But the shadows of history - personal, political - are cast over the entwined worlds of the Burtons, Ashrafs and the Tanakas as they are transported from Pakistan to New York, and in the novel's astonishing climax, to Afghanistan in the immediate wake of 9/11. The ties that have bound them together over decades and generations are tested to the extreme, with unforeseeable consequences. Sweeping in its scope and mesmerising in its evocation of time and place, Burnt Shadows is an epic narrative of disasters evaded and confronted, loyalties offered and repaid, and loves rewarded and betrayed.

  Publisher: Bloomsbury

  Kamila Shamsie

   

  Kamila Shamsie was born in 1973 in Pakistan. She is the author of In a City by the Sea, Kartography (both shortlisted for the Mail on Sunday/John Llewellyn Rhys Prize), Salt and Saffron and Broken Verses. In 1999 she received the Prime Minister's Award for Literature and in 2004 the Patras Bokhari Award - both award by the Pakistan Academy of Letters. Kamila Shamsie lives in London and Karachi.

   

  Sweeping in its scope and mesmerising in its evocation of time and place, Burnt Shadows, published by Bloomsbury in March 2009, is an epic narrative of disasters evaded and confronted, loyalties offered and repaid, and loves rewarded and betrayed.

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  American Wife

  Curtis Sittenfeld

  Black Swan
  

  American Wife

  Curtis Sittenfeld

  Longlisted, Orange Prize for Fiction

  In the year 2000, in the closest election in American history, Alice Blackwell's husband becomes president of the United States. Their time in the White House proves to be heady, tumultuous, and controversial. But it is Alice's own story - that of a kind, bookish, only child born in the 1940s Midwest who comes to inhabit a life of dizzying wealth and power - that is itself remarkable. Alice candidly describes her small-town upbringing, and the tragedy that shaped her identity; she recalls her early adulthood as a librarian, and her surprising courtship with the man who swept her off her feet; she tells of the crisis that almost ended their marriage; and she confides the privileges and difficulties of being first lady, a role that is uniquely cloistered and public, secretive and exposed. Alice Blackwell, Curtis Sittenfeld has created her most dynamic and complex heroine yet. American Wife is not a novel about politics. It is a gorgeously written novel that weaves race, class, fate and wealth into a brilliant tapestry. It is a novel in which the unexpected becomes inevitable, and the pleasures and pain of intimacy and love are laid bare.

  Publisher: Black Swan

  Curtis Sittenfeld

  Curtis Sittenfeld is the author of the bestselling novels American Wife, Prep, and The Man of My Dreams, which have been translated into twenty-five languages. Prep was chosen as one of the Ten Best Books of 2005 by The New York Times, and American Wife was chosen as one of the Ten Best Books of 2008 by Time, People, and Entertainment Weekly; both were nominated for the UK's Orange Prize. Curtis's non-fiction has appeared in many publications, including The New York Times, The Atlantic Monthly, Salon, Slate, Glamour, and on public radio's "This American Life." A graduate of Stanford University and the Iowa Writers' Workshop, Curtis has interviewed Michelle Obama for Time, appeared as a guest on NPR's "Fresh Air" and CBS's "Early Show," and been a strangely easy "Jeopardy!" answer (see below).

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  The Flying Troutmans

  Miriam Toews

  Faber
  

  The Flying Troutmans

  Miriam Toews

  Longlisted, Orange Prize for Fiction

  Meet the Troutmans. Hattie is living in Paris, city of romance, but has just been dumped by her boyfriend. Min, her sister back in Canada, is going through a particularly dark period. And Min's two kids, Logan and Thebes, are not talking and talking way too much, respectively. When Hattie receives a phone call from eleven-year-old Thebes, begging her to return to Canada, she arrives home to find Min on her way to a psychiatric ward, and becomes responsible for her niece and nephew. Realising that she is way out of her league, Hattie hatches a plan to find the kids' long-lost father. With only the most tenuous lead to go on, she piles Logan and Thebes into the family van, and they head south.

  Publisher: Faber

  Miriam Toews

   

  Miriam Toews (pronounced tâves) was born in 1964 in the small Mennonite town of Steinbach, Manitoba. She left Steinbach at eighteen, living in Montreal and London and touring Europe before coming back to Manitoba, where she earned a B.A. in film studies at the University of Manitoba. Later she packed up with her children and partner and moved to Halifax to attend the University of King’s College, where she received a bachelor’s degree in journalism. Upon returning to Winnipeg with her family in 1991, she freelanced at the CBC, making radio documentaries. When her youngest daughter started nursery school, Toews decided it was time to try writing a novel.
  
  Miriam Toews’s first novel, Summer of My Amazing Luck, was published in 1996; it was nominated for the Stephen Leacock Memorial Medal for Humour and won the John Hirsch Award. Published two years later, her second novel, A Boy of Good Breeding, won the McNally Robinson Book of the Year Award. Her most recent novel is the bestselling A Complicated Kindness, which was a Giller Prize Finalist and won the Governor General’s Literary Award for Fiction. Toews has also written for the CBC, This American Life (on National Public Radio), Saturday Night, Geist, Canadian Geographic, Open Letters and The New York Times Magazine, and she has won the National Magazine Award Gold Medal for Humour.
  
  In an interview with Herizons magazine, Toews discusses the motif of the absent mother in both Summer of My Amazing Luck and A Complicated Kindness: “The relationship I have with my mother is so strong and loving and fun, that maybe I had to, in order to have a character who was working through something difficult, have her gone – dead, or missing, or whatever, just absent – in order to create that conflict for my character. And, to get all psychoanalytical about it, I’ve been trying to understand my father for a long time now, and I think that in my own life, growing up, etcetera, my mother was sort of this buffer between him and me, in that she kind of protected me from his sadness and tried to make life fun and upbeat all the time. So maybe, in order for my character to understand her father better, and assuming that my characters are in some ways me, that particular buffer has to be removed.”

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  The Personal History of Rachel DuPree

  Ann Weisgarber

  Pan
  

  The Personal History of Rachel DuPree

  Ann Weisgarber

  Longlisted, Orange Prize for Fiction

  Shortlisted for the Orange Award for New Writers Long-listed for the Orange Prize Winner of the Texas Institute of Letters Debut Novel Prize It is 1917 in the South Dakota Badlands, and summer has been hard. Fourteen years have passed since Rachel and Isaac DuPree left Chicago to stake a claim in this unforgiving land. Isaac, a former Buffalo Soldier, is fiercely proud: black families are rare in the West, and black ranchers even rarer. But it hasn't rained in months, the cattle bellow with thirst, and supplies are dwindling. Pregnant, and struggling to feed her family, Rachel is isolated by more than just geography. She is determined to give her surviving children the life they deserve, but she knows that her husband will never leave his ranch: land means a measure of equality with the white man, and Isaac DuPree is not about to give it up just because times are hard. Somehow Rachel must find the strength to do what is right for her children, for her husband, and for herself. Moving and majestic, The Personal History of Rachel DuPree is an unforgettable novel about love and loyalty, homeland and belonging. Above all, it is the story of one woman's courage in the face of the most punishing adversity.

  Publisher: Pan