Longlist

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  Lyrics Alley

  Leila Aboulela

  Weidenfield and Nicholson
  

  Lyrics Alley

  Leila Aboulela

  Longlisted, Orange Prize for Fiction

  Set in Sudan in the 1950s, Lyrics Alley tells the story of the wealthy and powerful Abuzeid dynasty. One day their world is turned upside down when Nur, the heir to the family’s business, has an almost fatal accident. Nur’s dreams of university and success are shattered in an instant. A second blow comes when his betrothed, his cousin Soraya, breaks off their engagement.

  Against the backdrop of a Sudan in transition from British rule to independence, the accident shakes the Abuzied family to the core and causes them to question their values. Both Nur and Soraya are forced to reassess their purpose in life. Nur’s father Mahmoud Bey, has two wives, Waheeba and Nabilah who perhaps most aptly represent the conflict between tradition and modernity inherent in the period: While Waheeba lives by Sudanese traditions and resents Nabilah’s modernist tendencies, Nabilah wants to journey to her native Egypt and leave behind what she sees as the backwardness which plagues Sudanese society.

  At a time when women were meant to be seen but not heard and men were taught to believe certain ideals, Aboulela’s narration helps give all of her characters a voice of their own. Ultimately, she also succeeds in not overdramatizing or aggrandizing her characters’ plights, something which would be all too easy to do in this type of novel. Instead, with great eloquence and compassion, she draws the reader into the narrative and effectively evokes the challenges and trials and tribulations of this period.

  Publisher: Weidenfield and Nicholson

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  Jamrach's Menagerie

  Carol Birch

  Canongate Books
  

  Jamrach's Menagerie

  Carol Birch

  Longlisted, Orange Prize for Fiction

  Carol Birch's eleventh novel harnesses this same drive and commitment, producing a story of rich, vivid detail, brilliant characters and a satisfying and compelling narrative.

  Publisher: Canongate Books

  Carol Birch

  Carol Birch is the author of nine previous novels, including Scapegallows and Turn Again Home, which was longlisted for the Man Booker Prize. She has won the Geoffrey Faber Memorial Prize and the David Higham Award. She lives in Lancashire.

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  Room

  Emma Donoghue

  Picador
  

  Room

  Emma Donoghue

  Longlisted, Orange Prize for Fiction

  On the face of it this book is as dark as they come. A young woman is held hostage in a sound proof bunker. Repeatedly raped over a number of years by her captor, she gives birth to a son and it’s from the child’s perspective that the story is narrated.

  Publisher: Picador

  Emma Donoghue

  Born in 1969, Emma Donoghue is an Irish writer who lives in Canada. Her fiction includes the bestselling novel Slammerkin and her novels have been translated into thirty-nine languages. Room, her seventh novel, was shortlisted for the 2010 Man Booker Prize, won the Irish Novel of the Year and the Rogers Writers’ Trust Fiction Prize and most recently won in the Caribbean and Canada Best Book category of the Commonwealth Writers’ Prize. Donoghue has also been shortlisted for the Galaxy International Author of the Year and is winner of the TV Book Club. She lives in London, Ontario with Chris Roulston and their two children.

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  The Pleasure Seekers

  Tishani Doshi

  Bloomsbury
  

  The Pleasure Seekers

  Tishani Doshi

  Longlisted, Orange Prize for Fiction

  The dual heritages of India and Wales come together in this funny, bittersweet tale spanning four generations of Patels from dancer and poet, Tishani Doshi. Exploring integration, adaptability and the power of family bonds, Doshi treads that age-old ‘immigrant tale’ ground of where is home/what is my identity with a degree of originality. The Welsh setting helps and the characters all bustle with eccentricities and warmth.

  When Gujurati Babo leaves Madras in 1968 and meets Welsh Siân, his dad is furious, tricks him back to India on the pretext of his mother's illness, and hides his passport. Sian follows him to India to bring up their daughters, Mayuri (fiery) and Bean (spacey) and the book does a neat trick of subverting our expectations for an identity-strewn fish-out-of-water tale. The book flips between England and India, as the family grows and history takes place around them: Bhopal; Charles and Diana; Indira Gandhi assassination – all with the wise words of great-grandmother Ba echoing presciently in the background. Racism is abhorred, comedic and heart-wrenching. Love is played with, toyed with and reassessed. In the end, this bizarre family saga, with all its quirks sustaining it all the way through, is a top read with the playful language and character assassinations that Doshi spins off with ease.

  Publisher: Bloomsbury

  Tishani Doshi

  Tishani Doshi is a poet, journalist and dancer based in Chennai, India. She graduated with a master's degree in creative writing from Johns Hopkins University, and received an Eric Gregory Award 2001. Her first collection of poetry, Countries of the Body, won the Forward Poetry Prize for best first collection in 2006, and the opening poem, The Day We Went To The Sea, won the All India Poetry Competition in 2005.

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  Whatever You Love

  Louise Doughty

  Faber
  

  Whatever You Love

  Louise Doughty

  Longlisted, Orange Prize for Fiction

  Whatever You Love opens with that horrific scene that no parent ever wants to imagine: two police officers at the door telling you your nine-year-old child has been killed in a hit-and-run. The reader quickly follows narrator Laura into the morgue to identify her blonde daughter Betty, and from those first few pages, we are complicit in her journey of grief, self-destruction and angry revenge.

   

  Doughty jumps back and forth from present to past, vividly detailing Laura’s early relationship with David, Betty’s dad. The failure of Laura’s marriage is the second pivot point on which the plot rests; she feels equally aggrieved by the stealing of her daughter’s life by the driver she names Mr A and the snatching away of the love of her live by David’s fawn-eyed colleague Chloe. David is a handsome, sparky young character, but less fully drawn during the decline of the marriage; he comes back into focus, however, when he shares his heartache with Laura and they rekindle their love in an attempt to relieve each other’s pain from their daughter’s death.

   

  An undercurrent of anti-immigrant hatred in the small community where Laura lives amongst smug middle-class mothers and unemployed white youths emerges, as she conducts her own investigations into the driver who hands himself in to the police station. This gives the book a thoroughly contemporary feel.

   

  An unsettling and bleak novel, you will nevertheless keep reading; the plot is utterly compelling and keeps you turning the pages until the end to watch the unravelling Laura wreak havoc. Doughty does what she does best here: handling a complex plot with an intense dramatic portrayal of loss and its consequences.

  Publisher: Faber

  Louise Doughty

  Louise Doughty is the author of five novels - Crazy Paving, Dance with Me, Honey-Dew, Fires in the Dark and Stone Cradle - and one book of non-fiction, A Novel in a Year, based on her hugely popular Daily Telegraph column. Whatever You Love, her sixth novel, was shortlisted for the 2010 Costa Novel Award.  Doughty also writes radio plays and journalism and broadcasts regularly for BBC Radio 4. She lives in London.

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  A Visit from the Goon Squad

  Jennifer Egan

  Corsair
  

  A Visit from the Goon Squad

  Jennifer Egan

  Longlisted, Orange Prize for Fiction

  Told in an enigmatic way, flipping between narratives, characters and timeframes with ease, Egan paints portraits of some beautifully designed yet ultimately doomed to disappointment characters.

  Publisher: Corsair

  Jennifer Egan

  Jennifer Egan is the author of The Keep, Look at Me, The Invisible Circus, which became a feature film starring Cameron Diaz in 2001, and the story collection Emerald City and Other Stories. Her stories have been published in the New Yorker, Harper's Magazine, GQ, Zoetrope, and Ploughshares, and her nonfiction appears frequently in The New York Times Magazine. She lives with her husband and sons in Brooklyn.

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  The Memory of Love

  Aminatta Forne

  Bloomsbury
  

  The Memory of Love

  Aminatta Forne

  Longlisted, Orange Prize for Fiction

  Freetown, Sierra Leone: a devastating civil war has left an entire populace with terrible secrets to keep.

  Publisher: Bloomsbury

  Aminatta Forna

  Aminatta Forna was born in Scotland and raised in West Africa. Her first book, The Devil that Danced on the Water, was shortlisted for the Samuel Johnson Prize 2003. Her novel Ancestor Stones was winner of the 2008 Hurston/Wright Legacy Award, the Liberaturpreis in Germany, nominated for the International IMPAC Dublin Literary Award and selected by the Washington Post as one of the most important books of 2006. In 2007, Vanity Fair named Aminatta as one of Africa's most promising new writers. Aminatta has also written for magazines and newspapers, radio and television, and presented television documentaries on Africa’s history and art. She lives in London with her husband. The Memory of Love recently won the Africa Best Book category of the Commonwealth Writers’ Prize.

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  The London Train

  Tessa Hadley

  Jonathan Cape
  

  The London Train

  Tessa Hadley

  Longlisted, Orange Prize for Fiction

  The London Train is a novel in two parts, separate but wound together around a single moment, examining in vivid detail two lives stretched between two cities.

   

  Paul lives in the Welsh countryside with his wife Elise, and their two young children. The day after his mother dies he learns that his eldest daughter Pia, who was living with his ex-wife in London, has moved out from home and gone missing. He sets out in search of Pia, and when he eventually finds her, living with her lover in a chaotic flat in a tower block in King's Cross, he thinks at first he wants to rescue her. But the search for his daughter begins a period of unrest and indecision for Paul: he is drawn closer to the hub of London, to the excitements of a life lived in jeopardy, to Pia's fragile new family. Paul's a pessimist; when a heat wave scorches the capital week after week he fears that they are all 'sleep-walking to the edge of a great pit, like spoiled trusting children'. In the opposite direction, Cora is moving back to Cardiff, to the house she has inherited from her parents. She is escaping her marriage, and the constrictions and disappointments of her life in London. At work in the local library, she is interrupted by a telephone call from her sister-in-law and best friend, to say that her husband has disappeared. Connecting both stories is the London train, and a chance meeting that will have immediate and far-reaching consequences for both Paul and for Cora.

   

  The London Train is a vivid and absorbing account of the impulses and accidents that can shape our lives, alongside our ideas; about loyalty, love, sex and the complicated bonds of friends and family. Penetrating, perceptive, and wholly absorbing, it is an extraordinary new novel from one of the best writers working in Britain today.

  Publisher: Jonathan Cape

  Tessa Hadley

  Tessa Hadley is the author of the three highly praised novels, Accidents in the Home, which was longlisted for the Guardian First Book Award, Everything Will Be All Right and The Master Bedroom, and a collection of stories, Sunstroke. She lives in Cardiff and teaches literature and creative writing at Bath Spa University. Her stories appear regularly in the New Yorker, Granta and other magazines.

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  Grace Williams Says It Loud

  Emma Henderson

  Sceptre
  

  Grace Williams Says It Loud

  Emma Henderson

  Longlisted, Orange Prize for Fiction

  This could have been a relentlessly miserable story. Grace is born in the mid-1940s into a family and a society that does not know how to care for her.

  Publisher: Sceptre

  Emma Henderson

  Emma Henderson was born in 1958 and studied Modern Languages at Oxford and Yale. She taught English for more than a decade in London comprehensive schools and F.E. colleges, whilst having a family, then worked in France for several years, running a ski and snowboard lodge. She returned to London in 2005 where she still lives, and in 2006 gained a MA, with distinction, in Creative Writing at Birkbeck.  Grace Williams Says It Loud was shortlisted for the Wellcome Trust Book Prize.

   

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  The Seas

  Samantha Hunt

  Corsair
  

  The Seas

  Samantha Hunt

  Longlisted, Orange Prize for Fiction

  Samantha Hunt successfully manages to lead her readers through the story of an un-named girl who thinks she is a mermaid in a mystical and enticing way, rather than in a silly or contrived fashion. With spare poetic prose, her literary debut (a novella in size) hints that this is a voice to be watched in the future.

   

  Ever since her father walked into the ocean eleven years ago, the young woman waits for him to return. Similar to the descriptions of bleak, cold, northern towns by Annie Proulx in The Shipping News and Marcus Sedgwick in Revolver, `the highway only goes south from here'; the girl and her mother spend their time watching the waves on the beach or from the rocks, and her grandfather passes the days typesetting dictionaries that will never be printed.

   

  When not chambermaiding at run-down motels and dreaming of becoming a scientist, she dedicates her time to falling obsessively in love with Jude, a sailor twice her age who is almost a vision of her father. He has returned from the front line in Iraq with Post Traumatic Stress Syndrome and is now a broke, womanising alcoholic.

   

  To escape her dreary, lonely life, the narrator buries her imagination in her father’s notion that she is a ‘gift from the sea’ – with grave and mythical implications for her and those in her life.

  Publisher: Corsair

  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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  The Birth of Love

  Joanna Kavenna

  Faber
  

  The Birth of Love

  Joanna Kavenna

  Longlisted, Orange Prize for Fiction

  A precisely constructed narrative provides the framework for a theme that is essentially one of mystery. Birth, as the title suggests, is the novel’s central theme, but it works within the unstable half-worlds of the narrative: the shadowy boundary between reason and lunacy and the hazy insight of dreams.

   

  It takes a daring novelist to tackle the thorny issue of modern-day birth, and Kavenna approaches her subject with resolve. The physical realities of birth are explored in Brigid’s story, set in contemporary London, with a meticulous description of labour. This physicality is supported by the story of Semmelweis, based in an asylum in nineteenth century Austria, which contrasts the maddened state of its protagonist with his reasoned hypothesis: cleanliness amongst doctors would significantly reduce the mortality rate in pregnant women.

   

  In contrast to this scientific and physical examination of birth is a celebration of the inexpressible and of the instinctive. A further narrative strand depicts a future dystopia in which women are harvested for their eggs and then sterilised; no birth can occur. In the midst of this Brave New World a group of prisoners claim to have witnessed a birth; a return to a more natural, intuitive life that is surely to be celebrated.

   

  Four narrative strands as different in style and tone as they are similar in theme make up this ambitious second novel. This ambition is encapsulated in a broad sweep of years, styles, and self-referential motifs; the recurring imagery, phrases, symbols, and names all serve to reaffirm the central themes of birth and love.

  Publisher: Faber

  

  Joanna Kavenna

  Joanna Kavenna

  By the age of 24, Joanna Kavenna had written seven apparently unpublishable novels, as well as a doctorate. She spent some years trying to make a living by freelance writing, combining this with disastrous stints as an amanuensis.
  
  Eventually, exile seemed the best option, so she spent some years living in America, Germany, Scandinavia and France. This habit for nervous travel eventually produced her first published book, The Ice Museum, after which she lived in Paris and London while writing Inglorious, which is her first novel and won the 2008 Orange Award for New Writers.

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  Great House

  Nicole Krauss

  Viking
  

  Great House

  Nicole Krauss

  Longlisted, Orange Prize for Fiction

  The third novel from the immensely talented Nicole Krauss features themes familiar from her canon - loss, inevitability, the pretence of a normal life masking internal implosions.

  Publisher: Viking

  Nicole Krauss

  Nicole Krauss is the author of Man Walks into a Room and the international bestseller, The History of Love. Published by Penguin in 2005, it has sold over 250,000 copies and was shortlisted for the Orange, Medicis and Femina Prizes, and was a Richard and Judy Book Club pick. Nicole Krauss was selected by the New Yorker as one of its prestigious '20 under 40' best young writers and her books have been translated into more than thirty-five languages. She lives in Brooklyn, New York.

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  The Road to Wanting

  Wendy Law-Yone

  Vintage
  

  The Road to Wanting

  Wendy Law-Yone

  Longlisted, Orange Prize for Fiction

  Burmese-American Wendy Law-Yone’s third novel tells the story of Na Ga, a Burmese girl who has been caught up in a dizzying spiral of poverty, slavery and prostitution.

  The novel begins and centres on Wanting, a town on the Chinese-Burmese border, and opens with Na Ga’s attempt to take her own life. The reader learns about her recent past and that she has been spurned by her American lover Will, the only person to have ever taken a real interest in her. She realises that his obsession with her tribal origins and customs no longer holds his interest. As with all her personal encounters, as soon as she is no longer needed, she is quickly tossed aside. 

   

  As Na Ga journeys back to Burma, Law-Yone uses flashbacks to develop an insider’s perspective of Na Ga’s life. Here the reader learns things that Na Ga does not admit to other people: she was sold into slavery as a child and has not seen her mother or father since. She claims she speaks English so well because she learnt it at school, but we soon find out that she was rescued from slavery by an American family. However, when the political situation in Rangoon takes a sharp turn for the worse, they are forced to leave the country and left her behind. The passages of her time working in the brothel are graphic and unsettling and she is then rescued from the refugee camp by Will, only to be rejected ten years later and sent back to Burma.

   

  Law-Yone succeeds in deftly weaving the past and the present to produce Na Ga’s heart-wrenching story. The beautiful irony of the title is that even at the end, Na Ga seems so unsure of what she really does want or where is her true home. Although the novel tackles serious topics and reveals a deeply unpleasant side of Burmese society, the ending also suggests that even in the worst situations, there can be some hope of light at the end of the tunnel.

  Publisher: Vintage

  Wendy Law-Yone

   

  Wendy Law-Yone was born in Mandalay, Burma, and grew up in Rangoon, where her father founded the leading English-language daily, The Nation. Wendy was exiled to the United States where she published two novels, The Coffin Tree and Irrawaddy Tango, before her move to the UK following a David T.K. Wong creative writing fellowship at the University of East Anglia. She lives in London and Rye.

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  The Tiger's Wife

  Téa Obreht

  Weidenfeld & Nicolson
  

  The Tiger's Wife

  Téa Obreht

  Longlisted, Orange Prize for Fiction

  Calm, authoritative and compassionate, Téa Obreht’s debut novel portrays a wisdom far beyond her years.

  Publisher: Weidenfeld & Nicolson

  Téa Obreht

  Téa Obreht was born in 1985 in the former Yugoslavia and raised in Belgrade. In 1992 her family moved to Cyprus and then to Egypt, where she learned to speak and read English, eventually immigrating to the United States in 1997. After graduating from the University of Southern California, Téa received her MFA in Fiction from the Creative Writing Program at Cornell University in 2009. Téa was featured in The New Yorker's Top 20 Writers under 40 Fiction Issue (June 2010) and at 24, was the youngest on the list. Her short story, 'The Laugh', debuted in The Atlantic fiction issue and was then chosen for The Best American Short Stories 2010, a further short story, 'The Sentry', featured in the Guardian Summer Fiction Issue. Her journalism has appeared in Harper’s magazine and she lives in Ithaca, New York.

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  The Invisible Bridge

  Julie Orringer

  Viking
  

  The Invisible Bridge

  Julie Orringer

  Longlisted, Orange Prize for Fiction

  In September 1937 Andras, a young Hungarian student, leaves his family and heads for Paris on a scholarship to study architecture. Before he sets off he is given a mysterious letter to post on arrival in Paris. It is addressed to an Hungarian woman and no reason is given why it cannot be posted from Budapest. When Andras arrives in Paris he becomes vitally aware of his poverty, particularly when he enters the home of a richer Hungarian emigre Klara Morgenstern. She is a young widowed woman, and he finds himself falling in love with her. As they begin to meet regularly it is clear that Klara is hiding a terrifying secret, related to the mysterious letter that Andras posted on arrival, which means she is trapped in Paris as war looms closer. And, as Andras and his fellow students' lives become ever more vulnerable in the shadow of war, the group must shatter in order to survive. Andras is forced home to a labour camp, his brother disappears and Klara risks everything to return to Hungary to be close to her lover.

  Publisher: Viking

  Julie Orringer

  Julie Orringer was born in 1973 and grew up in New Orleans and Ann Arbor, Michigan. She is the author of the highly acclaimed collection How to Breathe Underwater, which was a New York Times Notable Book. She is the recipient of a fellowship from the National Endowment of the Arts and lives in Brooklyn.

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  Repeat It Today with Tears

  Anna Peile

  Serpent's Tail
  

  Repeat It Today with Tears

  Anna Peile

  Longlisted, Orange Prize for Fiction

  Repeat It Today With Tears is the story of an incestuous affair between an unknowing father and his estranged daughter.

   

  Bored and frustrated by her suburban home life, Susanna has always believed that an exciting new world would open up to her if she could only make contact with the father she never knew. She makes the startling discovery that this mysterious figure is still living in London just a few miles away and sets out to find him.

   

  She slowly begins to infiltrate his world, taking a job in the Chelsea market near where he lives. She learns about his life as an artist and illustrator and discovers all she can about him knowing that one day soon they must come face to face.

   

  Yet what’s coming isn’t a joyous reunion: it’s the point at which Susanna’s mental instability becomes horribly apparent. She flirts with her father making advances on the old man that would feel awkward even if we didn’t know the grizzly context. To her it’s destiny. To him it’s a situation he can’t understand but he’s not going to throw away the advances of an unknown young woman. Disaster follows.

   

  This book contains one of the most disarmingly cool unreliable narrators I have come across, which is helped along by writing with a poise you don’t often encounter in a first novel. Peile creates a tone that allows her to tell a story of madness and transgression with insight and sensitivity, offering light as well as heat.    

  Publisher: Serpent's Tail

  Anna Peile

   

  Anne Peile was born in London; she has lived in the South-west and Belfast and has worked as a cook, writing emails for the BBC and in educational support. She lives on a houseboat and works for a London bookstore.

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  Swamplandia!

  Karen Russell

  Chatto & Windus
  

  Swamplandia!

  Karen Russell

  Longlisted, Orange Prize for Fiction

  This exuberant fantastical romp about alligator wrestlers in the Florida Everglades by acclaimed author Karen Russell is, simply put, fun. Ava, daughter of the Bigtree wrestling dynasty, watches as her strange life of learning to wrestle alligators, enticing tourists and no school, soon turns to grief, dwindling ticket sales and the slow encroaching of a sophisticated competitor called The World of Darkness.

   

  When her mother dies, not from the occupational hazard of wrestling alligators, but from ovarian cancer, the family starts to fall apart without her as the main draw, without her to pick up all the pieces of the family’s claustrophobic co-dependency, without her to feed and clothe them. So, Ava must grow up quickly, save her family (especially her sister, who’s having a torrid affair with a dead person).

   

  The book is wittily written and flips between Ava’s quickly-unlearned naivety, the hopelessness of her broken father and her pragmatic brother, Kiwi, who sensing financial ruin in Swamplandia, does a deal with the devil, the corporate evil The World of Darkness.

  The book is funny, energetic and steams along at a fast-pace, filled with oddball characters and a world so intensely unique yet strangely familiar, you’ll be swept along for the ride from the first page.

  Publisher: Chatto & Windus

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  The Secret Lives of Baba Segis Wives

  Lola Shoneyin

  Serpent's Tail
  

  The Secret Lives of Baba Segis Wives

  Lola Shoneyin

  Longlisted, Orange Prize for Fiction

  This was a pleasant surprise. I found the story quite riveting; as a drama, the suspense built steadily and the characters had me taking sides with enthusiasm. The author's lyrical prose is a delight - I shall definitely seek out her poetry books - Shoneyin is one of those authors whose work one instinctively knows will always satisfy, I am glad to have discovered her.

  Publisher: Serpent's Tail

  Lola Shoneyin

   

  Lola Shoneyin has published three collections of poems. Having lived in London and the South-east for several years, Lola Shoneyin has recently moved to Abuja, Nigeria, where she teaches drama and English at a local school.

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  Annabel

  Kathleen Winter

  Jonathan Cape
  

  Annabel

  Kathleen Winter

  Longlisted, Orange Prize for Fiction

  In Annabel, Kathleen Winter has written a compelling and convincing debut novel that reads almost as a modern myth – a myth based on the taboo reality of intersexuality.    

  Publisher: Jonathan Cape

  Kathleen Winter

  Kathleen Winter has written dramatic and documentary scripts for Sesame Street and CBC Television. Her first collection of short stories, boys, was the winner of both the Winterset Award and the Metcalf-Rooke Award. A long-time resident of St John’s, Newfoundland, she now lives in Montreal.