Last year Madeline Miller's The Song of Achilles won the Orange Prize for Fiction (now the Women's Prize). That book made it into my top twelve books of 2012 because it was literally ah-MAZing*. I figure that if any judging panel has the sense to award the Orange Prize to The Song of Achilles, it is probably a pretty sensible and worthwhile prize to follow. On Wednesday the Longlist for the 2013 prize was announced. There are some standards (Hilary Mantel, I'm looking at you), some slightly controversial (Gone Girl) and some that I am pretty darn excited about (Life after Life and The Light Between Oceans). I've read one from the list, am familiar with about half and the other half are completely new to me.
The Longlist:
Kitty Aldridge - A Trick I Learned From Dead Men (Jonathan
Cape)
Kate Atkinson - Life After Life (Doubleday)
Ros Barber -
The Marlow Papers (Sceptre)
Shani Boianjiu - The People of
Forever are Not Afraid (Hogarth)
Gillian Flynn - Gone Girl
(Weidenfeld & Nicolson)
Sheila Heti - How Should a Person Be?
(Harvill Secker)
A M Homes - May We Be Forgiven
(Granta)
Barbara Kingslover - Flight Behaviour (Faber &
Faber)
Deborah Copaken Kogen - The Red Book (Virago)
Hilary
Mantel - Bring Up the Bodies (Fourth Estate)
Bonnie Nadzam -
Lamb (Hutchinson)
Emily Perkins - The Forrests (Bloomsbury
Circus)
Michèle Roberts - Ignorance (Bloomsbury)
Francesca Segal
- The Innocents (Chatto & Windus)
Maria Semple - Where’d You
Go, Bernadette (Weidenfeld & Nicolson)
Elif Shafak - Honour
(Viking)
Zadie Smith - NW (Hamish Hamilton)
M L Stedman -
The Light Between Oceans (Doubleday) Read Jan 2013
Carrie Tiffany - Mateship
with Birds (Picador)
G Willow Wilson - Alif the Unseen (Corvus
Books)
(Ones in bold I'm particularly excited to read.)
I do think it is a shame Alison Moore's The Lighthouse is missing from the list but with so many amazing women writers around, it must have been tricky trying to whittle it down to twenty. I can only imagine how hard it will be to get to a shortlist and then to a single winner. That must be a serious brain ache.
To the whole point of this post - the challenge. I'm sure I'm hitching my waggon to an already long bandwagon of personal challenges but what the hell, I fancy doing it. The winner of the prize will be announced on the 5th June but what with all the millions of other books I'm planning to read in the next two months I don't think it is possible to read them all before then. So, as a compromise, I am going to devote my summer reading to the Women's Prize for Fiction longlist. I am challenging myself to read the longlist before September 1st 2013. You never know, I may get to read them all before June 5th but I'm not going to rush. Some of these books sound brilliant so I am going to savour them and thoroughly enjoy them.
Is anyone else planning to read the longlist?
* Apparently Miller's second novel is based on The Odyssey. Please excuse me while I freak out/dance with joy/reread The Odyssey (AGAIN)...
