The shortlist for the 2009 Orange Prize for Fiction was announced earlier today. The six...
The shortlist for the 2009 Orange Prize for Fiction was announced earlier today. The six shortlisted novels are:
Scottsboro by Ellen Feldman (Picador)
The Wilderness by Samantha Harvey (Cape)
The Invention of Everything Else by Samantha Hunt (Harvill Secker)
Molly Fox’s Birthday by Deidre Madden (Faber)
Home by Marilynne Robinson (Virago)
Burnt Shadows by Kamila Shamsie (Bloomsbury)
Listen to Granta editor Alex Clark discuss the shortlist on BBC Radio 4’s
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‘I think there should be a National Service of Hospitality. The best way to see the true face of humanity is to serve it a plate of chips.’
Camilla Grudova on bad-mannered customers.
‘Anyone who has ever worked night shifts will understand the vertiginous feeling that comes with staring down the day from the wrong end.’
A.K. Blakemore on working nights.
‘I was constantly reading job ads, trying to find my holy grail – a job I could stand to do, and someone foolish enough to hire me.’
Sandra Newman on learning how to play professional blackjack.
‘I loved being a receptionist. What I loved about it was playing the part of being a receptionist.’
Emily Berry on being a temporary office worker.
‘Every part of you would swell, including your eyeballs, and no matter how much water you drank, you were always dehydrated.’
Junot Díaz on working for a steel mill.
A journalist receives a troubling call about a friend in this excerpt from Madeleine Bunting’s new novel Ceremony of Innocence.
‘Pictures from some cities in Latin America: the burning in front of the family home of the dead who are not collected by the state.’
A coronavirus diary from the Portuguese writer Gonçalo M. Tavares, translated by Daniel Hahn.
‘My Cairo is an inverted city, one that wears its innards above the skin.’
‘You can throw yourself into any fantasy, she (and her country) might have been saying, so long as you don’t mistake it for real life.’
‘The anglophone world, we have to infer, has run out of words for its own feelings.’
Daisy Hildyard on the wisdom of scarecrows.
