Thursday 21 April 2011

3 Debut Novels on Orange Shortlist

Grace Williams Says it Loud by Emma HendersonThree debut novels feature on the shortlist for the 2011 Orange Prize for Fiction. They are Grace Williams Says it Loud by Emma Henderson - a love story about an epileptic, Daniel, and Grace, whom he meets in a mental home; The Tiger’s Wife by Téa Obreht - a journey of discovery about a young doctor coming to terms with her grandfather's death in the aftermath of the war in Serbia; and Annabel by Kathleen Winter – the story of a baby born in remote Newfoundland with male and female genitalia. The favourite to win the 2011 prize is Emma Donoghue’s Room – a moving story about a mother and son imprisoned for years in a single room, resonant of the Fritzl case. Nicole Krauss’s The History of Love was shortlisted for the 2006 prize. Her book on the 2011 shortlist, Great House, takes in three sub-plots: the arrest of a Chilean poet, a man caring for his dying wife in London, and a Jerusalem-based antiques dealer. Aminatta Forna’s The Memory of Love is a powerful portrait of Sierra Leone in the aftermath of a decade of civil war. Bathany Hughes, Chair of the judging panel said "Even though the stories in our final choices range from kidnapping to colonialism, from the persistence of love to Balkan folk-memory, from hermaphroditism to abuse in care, the books are written with such a skilful lightness of touch, humour, sympathy and passion, they all make for an exhilarating and uplifting read. This shortlist should give hours of reading pleasure to the wider world." The winner of the 2011 Orange Prize will be announced in London on the 8th of June. The prize is a cheque for £30,000 and a limited edition bronze statue known as ‘the Bessie’. Just getting shortlisted will mean a healthy spike in sales for all of the authors. Recent winners have included US novelists Barbara Kingsolver, who won last year for The Lacuna, and Marilynne Robinson in 2009 for Home. The prize was created in 1996 to celebrate and promote fiction written by women throughout the world to the widest range of readers posssible and is awarded for the best novel of the year written by a woman. To celebrate the 2011 shortlist, the Orange Book Store is giving away 250 free eBooks of The Lacuna by Barbara Kingsolver, winner of the 2010 Orange Prize, excusively to Facebook fans.

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