Prize speculation

 

The Women's Prize for Fiction 2025.

Hot on the heels of the non fiction longlist the 2025 Women's Prize for fiction longlist will be announced on Tuesday and I've seen lots of social media speculating on what might make the cut (and lots of 'dream' longlists) so I thought I would join in.

Thanks to a list that has been pulled together on Good Reads (which you don't need an account to see) and careful scrutiny of my reading journal I think that I've read 42 books that are eligible for the prize, as well as having two on my to be read pile as they aren't out yet, and another two that I abandoned.

At first I was quite surprised how few books that I read last year were eligible and then I looked more closely at the rules for the prize:

• Books have to have been published between 1st April 2024 and 31st March 2025
• No translations
• No short stories or novellas
• The book has to have been published in the UK between the above dates

My reading choices last year wiped out a huge chunk of eligible fiction books as I read so much in translation, and my rediscovery of novellas and short stories eliminated another handful. Plus I read a lot of non fiction...

Anyhow the longlist will comprise 14 books this year, and while I can recommend many of the books I read last year I don't think that a lot of them would be deemed 'prize worthy', indeed looking at the Good Reads list I've read very little of the last year's 'literary' output!

I've created a list of 10 books I'd like to see on the list but I don't think that I'll have a great hit rate

Books on my list, in no particular order:

• There are Rivers in the Sky by Elif Shafak
• The Instrumentalist by Harriet Constable
• The Silence in Between by Josie Ferguson
• The Ministry of Time by Kaliane Bradley
• Three Days in June by Anne Tyler
• The Glass Maker by Tracey Chevalier
• Elegy, Southwest by Madeleine Watts
• Tell Me Everything by Elizabeth Strout
• Lula Dean's Little Library of Banned Books by Kirsten Miller
• Le Fay by Sophie Keetch

Micro Review 5 (2023)

 

Black Butterflies by Priscilla Morris (Duckworth Books)

I was quite excited by the Women's Prize longlist this year as several books I'd read and loved were on it, sadly when it came to the shortlist none of these made the cut, and (contrary to every other reader I've met) the one I had read wasn't a hit with me at all.

On reading the blurbs for the others I want to try some of them but it was Black Butterflies that instantly caught my eye - the striking cover also helped with this!

After the fall of the Berlin Wall one of my other big historical memories of the 1990s is the conflict in the Balkans. We had our first family holiday abroad in 1990 and we went to Yugoslavia. We loved the place and planned on going back in 1991 but then Croatia declared independence shortly before our holiday and we ended up in Mallorca (quite a different location!). Following on from this declaration the area descended in to various conflicts, including the siege of Sarajevo, the setting for this novel.

This book details the siege through the eyes of Zora - an artist and teacher in Sarajevo, it starts before things descend in to utter chaos and Zora is able to get her husband and elderly mother out of the city to relatives in England but she remains in the city to tidy up the loose ends. Before she can leave the airport is closed and the city besieged.

The book focuses very much on the daily life of the people trapped in the city, the general violence, the hunger and the fear - it is not particularly about any sectarian divides and definitely not about neighbours turning on neighbours - and I found it utterly compelling and very hard to put down.

Parts of the books are quite gruesome but are definitely not gratuitous, and I also liked that through Zora's eyes you see how you can become desensitised to anything in extreme situations. Not an easy read but a book I'm really pleased to have read. The Balkan conflicts have faded in our memories and this book shows that Sarajevo in the 1990s wasn't that different to the WW2 sieges of Leningrad and Stalingrad and deserve to be remembered.

Micro Review 4 (2023)

 

Wandering Souls by Cecile Pin (Fourth Estate)

This book has been longlisted for the 2023 Women’s Prize and while I don’t have time to read the whole longlist this one really leapt out at me and I am so pleased that it did.

To my shame the Vietnam War is not something I know a lot about, in fact I think I know more about the end of French rule in Indochina than I do about the American conflict, and the fallout through the 1970s and 1980s (and most of this comes from the musical Miss Saigon which is not a great admission).

Wandering Souls  is told in many voices but all of them relate to the story of siblings Anh, Thanh and Minh as they flee Vietnam in one of the small boats first to Hong Kong and then the UK. To say much more will spoil the way the book unfolds and I really wouldn’t want that to be the case as I loved it so much.

It is a shortish book but one that punches well above its weight in many ways and at more than one point I was in tears as well as reaching for my phone to research more about the things mentioned. It opens up so many things to talk about, and I also liked the exploration of intergenerational trauma which I’ve read a lot about regarding the Holocaust but hadn’t thought about in regards to other conflicts.

I also came away really wanting to try some of the food that is eaten in the book but this feels a very shallow response to such a great book.