Womens fiction

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Bailey’s Women’s Prize for Fiction Longlist 2015

lbaileyslogoTwenty books have now been selected that make up the 2015 long list for the Bailey’s (previously The Orange) Prize for Fiction. They will be reduced to six on April 13 and the winner announced at the Royal Festival Hall on 3 June 2015.

Previous winners include Eimear McBride for A Girl is a Half-formed Thing (2014) and A.M. Homes for May We Be Forgiven (2013), Madeline Miller for The Song of Achilles (2012) and Téa Obreht for The Tiger’s Wife (2011).

Shami Chakrabarti, Chair of judges, had this to say about this year’s selection:

“The Prize’s 20th year is a particularly strong one for women’s fiction.  All judges fought hard for their favourites and the result is a 2015 list of 20 to be proud of – with its mix of genres and styles, first-timers and well-known names from around the world.”

From the list of 20, I have read only one and it was absolutely brilliant, Laline Paull’s The Bees and I am currently just over half through Anne Tyler’s A Spool of Blue Thread which reminds me of the experience of reading Jonathan Franzen’s family saga The Corrections.

So here it is, the list of twenty books long listed for the Baileys Women’s Prize for Fiction:

Rachel Cusk: Outline

Lissa Evans: Crooked Heart

Patricia Ferguson: Aren’t We Sisters?

Xiaolu Guo: I Am China

Samantha Harvey: Dear Thief

Emma Healey: Elizabeth is Missing

Emily St. John Mandel: Station Eleven

Grace McCleen: The Offering

Sandra Newman: The Country of Ice Cream Star

Heather O’Neil: The Girl Who Was Saturday Night

Laline Paull: The Bees

Marie Phillips: The Table of Less Valued Knights

Rachel Seiffert: The Walk Home

Kamila Shamsie: A God in Every Stone

Ali Smith: How to be Both

Sara Taylor: The Shore

Anne Tyler: A Spool of Blue Thread

Sarah Waters: The Paying Guests

Jemma Wayne: After Before

PP Wong: The Life of a Banana

The prize is being shadowed by a group of excellent bloggers, including one of my all time favourites Eric at Lonesome Reader, organised by Naomi at The Writes of Women.

They will be reading all the books and many of them have read at least five or six already, that’s where I’ll be heading to decide which books might appeal to me and where I recommend you look for some of the best reviews.

So which books have you read, or plan to read?

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Not the Orange Women’s Prize for Fiction Longlist

Womens prize logoThere may not be a new sponsor yet, however 20 books appear on the long list for the international Women’s Prize for Fiction and although there are certain predictable inclusions, such as Hilary Mantel’s Bring Up the Bodies, Barbara Kingsolver’s Flight Behaviour and Zadie Smith’s NW, it is great to see such a diverse range of excellent books.

life after lifeI have managed to read a few already, here are links to my reviews of Elif Shafak’s Honour, M.L.Stedman’s The Light Between Oceans and Kate Atkinson’s Life after Life. I enjoyed all three books, but won’t be trying to guess the winner, it’s much too subjective to choose, read the reviews and see what appeals to you. I am sure there is something for everyone.

There is an interesting article in The Guardian today with links to a synopsis and reviews for all of the books. They include reader reviews as well as journalist reviews. The Guardian Bookshop is an interesting alternative for buying new books in the UK, particularly as they don’t charge an additional delivery charge for every book.

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 of any nationality, country of residence, age or subject matter is eligible. The shortlist will be announced on April 16. Happy Reading!

The Longlist of 20 novels

Womens-Prize-longlist

Kitty Aldridge A Trick I Learned From Dead Men

Kate Atkinson Life After LifeHonour

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 Forrests122012_0454_TheLightBet1.jpg

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

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Travelling Life’s Long Road – The Bridge Club by Patricia Sands

Reading Patricia Sand’s The Bridge Club feels a little like taking a long road trip with a friend, she drives as we listen to her narrate this story of eight female characters, a condensed version of their lives, her voice like the gentle thrum of the engine, lulling us at times into a companionable silence, we listen and observe the passing landscape of years, immersing into these lives as if they were our own.

After forty years of friendship a group of friends are to spend a weekend at a mountain cottage, a location they have been to many times before, only this weekend will see them face a challenge unlike any other they have had to live through to date. Acknowledging the importance that this group of friends has been in each of their lives, affectionately referred to as BC, the Bridge Club, they each share their SOS, ‘support of sisters’ moment before facing the ultimate test of friendship that awaits them.

They could each identify at least one time or experience, some lasting longer than others, when family or other support was not the answer and the BC had come to the rescue.

In this way each of the characters are introduced and we learn of a significant event in their lives that required this band of sisters to come together and thrash out a problem in a way that left no other option than to resolve the dilemma shared. It gets inside the minds of how a group of women think and they aren’t always necessary in agreement, but by the end they will have agreed on a course of action that has the support of them all and often some kind of intervention as well.

We live through marriage, divorce, adoption, coming out, the premature death of a spouse and it will culminate in that weekend away, where it becomes apparent what the past forty years of friendship has been preparing them for, for nothing less than a rock solid lifelong friendship could endure what they must go through.

A moment of intense quiet followed this exchange, a moment when their connection was almost palpable, with no doubt or hesitation. Their strength flowed from one to the other and bound them together as never before.

By the end of this read, we have had a glimpse into the lives of eight ordinary women, who like every one of us have lived through some extraordinary moments and we can only marvel at how fortunate they were not just to have found each other, but to have kept this bond of friendship together over the years and to have each benefited from the powerful gift that it offered, that magic synergy where the combined intention and actions of a dedicated group surpasses the sum of each its parts.

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Dinah, her Mothers and a woman named Ruth

Aix Yoga Center Teachers

‘The Red Tent’ was published nearly 15 years ago but only came to my attention a couple of weeks ago through one of those wonderful connections that sometimes occur out of the blue when you are least expecting it.

The hilltop village of Villeneuve

Recently I met Jaci, an Aix Yoga Centre teacher, who organised a day at her home in Villeneuve, two hours of yoga in the morning, a shared lunch and aromatherapy massage in the afternoon. The first lady who came to see me for a treatment wasn’t doing yoga, she arrived with her well-used hiking poles, out of the hills of Forcalquier, having decided that a 90 minute walk before a 90 minute massage would be a good idea.

Yoga in a Mongolian yurt in Villeneuve

And so I met Ruth, a wonderful free-spirited woman with long flowing blonde dreadlocks, originally from Tuscon, Arizona, living in a farmhouse up in the fertile hills of Provence, where she lives with her French husband and two daughters.

As I worked away, I casually mentioned my very dear friend and book buddy CKC, who also comes from Tuscon and had she by any chance read Nancy E. Turner’s excellent trilogy ‘These is My Words’, a story about the author’s grandmother Sarah Prine, pioneer woman from the same area?

Well, from there we traded book titles and discovered we loved the same books and both went away with a “you MUST read” recommendation, mine to her being Sandra Gulland’s trilogy on the life and sorrows of Josephine Bonaparte and hers to me, Anita Diamant’s ‘The Red Tent’, “My daughters and I loved that book” she said.

The Red Tent

Dinah is the only daughter of Jacob, who fathered 12 sons by four wives who were sisters. It is from her perspective that we are told her mother Leah’s stories, her own story in the land of her birth and her exile in Egypt.

 “If you want to understand any woman, you must first ask about her mother and then listen carefully. Stories about food show a strong connection. Wistful silences demonstrate unfinished business.”

Aromatherapy Massage in ‘The White Tent’

And in ‘The Red Tent’, that place set aside for women to inhabit during their monthly cycle, secrets of womanhood were shared and passed down the generations, the clan of Jacob.

The book is epic, taking us through the joys and sorrows of births, miscarriages, barrenness, jealousies, betrayals, the vivid and revelatory dreams of sisters seeking insight and forgiveness.

We meet Rachel, whose presence was as powerful as the moon; it was her beauty that lured Jacob into the family fold, her body emitting the scent of fresh water, filling the dusty hills where they live with the promise of life and wealth.

Leah, Dinah’s mother and herself mother to seven sons, her twin coloured eyes, generous height and fertile womb giving her unique status.

Zilpah, daughter of an Egyptian slave, a few months younger than Leah, milk-sisters and playmates since childhood, who said she remembered everything that happened to her, including her own birth.

Bilhah, last born of the sisters, another daughter of a slave who ran off when she was young – tiny, dark, the silent one.

It is the women we come to know and understand and whose stories we follow, as they navigate life, love, marriage, heartbreak, living in a caravan of tents with a father they no longer respect, now creating their own large family, trying to better themselves until one tragic episode arrives to undo it all.

And for that, if you haven’t done so already, you will just have to find a copy of this ambitious, riveting tale of the lives of these women living in ancient times.

“If you sit on the bank of a river, you see only a small part of its surface. And yet, the water before your eyes is proof of unknowable depths. My heart brims with thanks for the kindness you have shown me by sitting on the banks of this river, by visiting the echoes of my name.”

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Orange Prize Shortlist

From the longlist of 20 books, today a shortlist of five has been announced, for the 17th annual Orange Prize for women’s writing.

Set up to acknowledge and celebrate women’s contribution to storytelling the Award celebrates excellence, originality and accessibility in women’s writing throughout the world. It is awarded to a novel written by a woman in the English language.

Last year the award was won by Téa Obreht for The Tiger’s Wife and previous winners have included Barbara Kingsolver for The Lacuna, Andrea Levy’s A Small Island and Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie for Half of a Yellow Sun, which is currently being made into a film.

This year the shortlist includes:

Esi Edugyan                 ‘Half Blood Blues’           Canadian      2nd Novel

Anne Enright               ‘The Forgotten’                Irish             5th Novel

Georgina Harding      ‘Painter of Silence’             British         3rd Novel

Madeline Miller         ‘The Song of Achilles’         American      1st Novel

Cynthia Ozick              ‘Foreign Bodies’              American      7th Novel

Ann Patchett              ‘State of Wonder’             American      6th Novel

Short Synopses and Biographies can be read here.

The winner will be announced at an awards ceremony to be held at the Royal Festival Hall in London on 30 May 2012.

I haven’t read any on the list yet, but I have Ann Patchett’s ‘State of Wonder’ on the shelf and I have been eyeing up ‘Half Blood Blues’ for some time.

And you? Have you read any of the titles from either the short or the long list yet, or planning to?

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An Ode to Love or a Dear John?

Now that I have taken the bold step to create a blog, I guess it should come as no surprise that I am subsequently contacted out of the blue by a new author who has asked me to review her book, ‘Seven Days to Tell You’ due for publication on June 1st 2011.  So here it is and thanks again Ruby.

‘Seven Days to Tell You’ could be renamed ‘Seven Days to Figure It Out’ except that it is sure to take less than seven days to read because once you start, this book has a way of hooking you in and stirring your curiosity in an unputdownable kind of way.  It shifts and changes in time and point of view, keeping you wondering and guessing through its many twists and turns.

 Ruby Soames first novel succeeded the vote of bookclub readers whose opinion influences which novels are chosen for publication by Hookline Books and I can see why this riveting, page turning novel was enjoyed by so many and undoubtedly hotly discussed.

Kate is a paediatric doctor not given to wild, spontaneous acts, so surprises some and generates envy in others when she marries the wild, charming and mysterious Marc, a Frenchman she meets during a brief encounter at the end of an otherwise disappointing holiday.  She appears to have proven the doubters wrong, until one day three years into their marriage, Marc disappears without trace.

After three fruitless years searching for him, Kate is beginning to rebuild her life when she wakes one morning to find the familiar form of her errant husband in bed beside her.  He asks for seven days to prove his love, seven days to spend together before she makes her inevitable decision.

Soames doesn’t give anything away and is adept in her use of the unusual second person viewpoint in much of the narrative, which makes reading her story a little like reading a private letter or prying into someone’s journal; it’s not written to you the reader, it addresses Marc and like eavesdropping on a conversation, you find yourself trying to fill in the gaps to figure out what’s not being said.  It is only through the more reliable interactions with other characters that the truth begins to emerge. 

Often unpredictable, you will want to discuss this book and the relationship it describes with your friends, the intrigue it arouses continues long after the last page is turned.