The longlist for the 2022 Women's Prize has been announced! There are a lot of surprises and there are quite a few ghosts/spirits in these stories. I've posted a video on my YouTube channel discussing the 16 novels. There are at least four dubut novels. A number of these authors have been longlisted before including Rachel Elliot, Charlotte Mendelson, Leone Ross, Catherine Chidgey and Elif Shafak. There are a number of authors from the UK and America, but some come from Trinidad and Tobago, New Zealand and Turkey.

I'm especially thrilled to see This One Sky Day by Leone Ross and Great Circle by Maggie Shipstead listed as these were two of my favourite novels that I read last year. I'm also delighted to see that The Paper Palace by Miranda Cowley Heller and The Island of Missing Trees by Elif Shafak are nominated. Given how much Anna described her dislike of Heller's novel in our predictions video, I'm sure there will be lots of good debate about this book!

I'm excited to see The Sentence by Louise Erdrich, Build Your House Around My Body by Violet Kupersmith, The Book of Form and Emptiness by Ruth Ozeki, Sorrow and Bliss by Meg Mason, The Final Revival of Opal & Nev by Dawnie Walton and The Exhibitionist by Charlotte Mendelson listed as I've been wanting to read these anyway. I'd not heard that Rachel Elliott has a new novel out but I really enjoyed her previous novel Whispers Through a Megaphone (also Women's Prize longlisted) so I'm looking forward to reading Flamingo. I'd not heard of the novels by Lisa Allen-Agostini, Lulu Allison, Kirsty Capes, Catherine Chidgey and Morowa Yejidé but they all sound fascinating so it's wonderful that this list has tipped me off to books I probably wouldn't have encountered otherwise.

Currently I've only read 4 books from this group. Before it was announced I didn't think I'd read the whole longlist, but now I've looked through them all they sound really good. So I'm going to aim to read all 16 before the shortlist is announced on April 27th but it'll depend on how busy I am. I might start by reading The Bread the Devil Knead or The Exhibitionist. It's definitely surprising that Sally Rooney, Lauren Groff, Hanya Yanagihara and Honoree Fanonne Jeffers didn't make the list.