The twenty books on the longlist for this year’s Women’s Prize for Fiction (formerly the Orange Prize) have been announced. And here they are:
- Kitty Aldridge, A Trick I Learned From Dead Men
- Kate Atkinson, Life After Life
- Ros Barber, The Marlowe Papers
- Shani Boianjiu, The People of Forever are Not Afraid
- Gillian Flynn, Gone Girl
- Sheila Heti, How Should A Person Be?
- A.M. Homes, May We Be Forgiven
- Barbara Kingsolver, Flight Behaviour
- Deborah Copaken Kogan, The Red Book
- Hilary Mantel, Bring Up the Bodies
- Bonnie Nadzam, Lamb
- Emily Perkins, The Forrests
- Michèle Roberts, Ignorance
- Francesca Segal, The Innocents
- Maria Semple, Where’d You Go, Bernadette
- Elif Shafak, Honour
- Zadie Smith, NW
- M.L. Stedman, The Light Between Oceans
- Carrie Tiffany, Mateship with Birds
- G. Willow Wilson, Alif the Unseen
Out of the twenty, I’ve read three: NW (which I liked very much), The Forrests (which I thought was all right), and How Should a Person Be? (which I didn’t really like at all). I have Shani Boianjiu’s book to review for Bookmunch, so I’ll be reading that before long. I started reading Honour last year and liked it, but stopped for some reason I can’t fathom; I really ought to pick it up again.
Gone Girl has been the toast of many a book blog, and I’ve also seen plenty of favourable noises about Where’d You Go Bernadette. I’ve been meaning to read both, and am also intrigued by Kate Atkinson’s latest. Looking through the other titles, Kitty Aldridge’s jumps out in particular as sounding of interest. So they’d be top of my reading list – how about you?
13th March 2013 at 6:18 pm
Alif The Unseen has been top of my wishlist for some time now and I never realised that ‘G.’ was female! It sounds great, will definitely treat myself to a copy of that soon. Other than that I am most intrigued by Lamb of all of these, I’ve read some wonderful reviews of that one. It seems like a list with several very strong contenders, though. I haven’t been as enthused as this about a literary longlist for quite some time.
15th March 2013 at 8:31 pm
Brilliant – thanks for posting! Lots of fabulous novels to add to my to-read pile, here!