Baileys Women's Prize for Fiction 2016 Shortlist

Irish authors Anne Enright and Lisa McInerney are among the six writers on the shortlist for this year's Baileys Women's Prize for Fiction. Enright has been shortlisted for The Green Road with McInerney nominated for The Glorious Heresies.

The Green Road follows the return home to County Clare of five members of a family at Christmas. The reunion forces them to confront the weight of family ties and the road that brought them home. Enright won the Man Booker prize in 2007 for her previous novel, The Gathering, another Irish family saga detailing much conflict and complication.

Lisa McInerney's The Glorious Heresies is her debut novel. It tells of how an accidental killing in Cork affects the lives of five misfits who exist on the fringes of Ireland's post-crash society.

Two other debut novelists have been shortlisted for the Baileys award. They are Hannah Rothschild for The Improbability of Love and Cynthia Bond for Ruby.

The Improbability of Love follows the purchase of a lost masterpiece by Watteau which draws Annie McDee unwillingly into the art world where she finds herself pursued by a host of interested parties that would do anything to possess her picture.

Ruby tells of 30-year-old Ruby Bell’s return to her hometown in Texas where she is forced to deal with the racism and sexism that darkened her childhood.

The other titles on the shortlist are by American authors Hanya Yanagihara and Elizabeth McKenzie.

A Little Life by Hanya Yanagihara is a powerful and heartbreaking novel of brotherly love and the limits of human endurance. It follows the steady decent of the chronically damaged Jude St Francis despite the support of his intimate circle of three friends.

The Portable Veblen by Elizabeth McKenzie is about a Norwegian translator on the cusp of marriage with brilliant neuroscientist Paul, but is their love strong enough to survive the combined seismic pressures of respective dysfunctional families, corporate greed and terminally-stretched morals?

The Baileys Women’s Prize for Fiction is the UK’s most prestigious annual book award for fiction written by a woman. Founded in 1996, the Prize was set up to celebrate excellence, originality and accessibility in writing by women throughout the world. Margaret Mountford, Chair of judges said "Our choices reflect a really diverse mix of brilliant writing from new and established authors around the world and we hope that everyone will find much to enjoy in them".