Read these contenders for the Women's Prize for Fiction before the winner is announced June 15. This year’s shortlist incorporates a range of themes including belonging and identity, the power of nature, the burden of history, personal freedom, sisterhood, mental illness, ghosts, gender violence, and the opportunity for renewal.
The Book of Form and Emptiness by Ruth Ozeki
With its blend of sympathetic characters, riveting plot, and vibrant engagement with everything from jazz, to climate change, to our attachment to material possessions, The Book of Form and Emptiness is classic Ruth Ozeki--bold, wise, poignant, playful, humane and heartbreaking.
Sorrow And Bliss by Meg Mason
Mason's bleakly comic debut examines with pitiless clarity the impact of the narrator's mental illness on her closest relationships.
Bread The Devil Knead by Lisa Allen-Agostini
An engrossing and atmospheric novel with a strong feminist message at the heart of its page-turning plot. It explores an abusive love affair with searing honesty, and skillfully tackles the issue of gender violence and racism against the lush and heady backdrop of a national festival, and the music that feeds it.
The Island of Missing Trees by Elif Shafak
A tale of love and division moves between postcolonial Cyprus and London, exploring themes of generational trauma and belonging.
The Sentence by Louise Erdrich
Tookie, who has landed a job selling books after years of incarceration that she survived by reading with murderous attention, must solve the mystery of a haunting while at the same time trying to understand all that occurs in Minneapolis during a year of grief, astonishment, isolation, and furious reckoning.
The Great Circle by Maggie Shipstead
At fifteen, Marian drops out of school and finds an unexpected and dangerous patron in a wealthy rancher who provides a plane and subsidizes her lessons, an arrangement that will haunt her for the rest of her life, even as it allows her to fulfill her destiny: circumnavigating the globe and piloting her plane over the Arctic Circle.
