The Women’s Prize for Fiction Shortlist 2020

Here are the six novels on this year’s Women’s Prize for Fiction shortlist! How are we all feeling about these picks. Good choices, right? I think it might be the best group in years as they’re a really strong and varied group of contenders. The stories range from the Bronze age to Tudor times to modern-day NYC. The shortest novel on the list is 208 pages and the longest is 882! I give a lot more of my thoughts on this year’s list in a new video I just posted here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3M75MGjEYbk

I must admit, I’m probably most happy to see “Weather” as I loved this short impactful novel and I’m glad it’s getting more attention. Of course, “Girl, Woman, Other” is excellent and yes deserves more attention even though it already co-won The Booker Prize. Will Evaristo get to stand on her own in the spotlight this time? I’m also glad “Dominicana” is on the list as I’m eager to read it and this nomination is the final push I need to get me to read “The Mirror and the Light” soonish (rather than letting it gather dust on my shelf for years with the intention to read it one day ) “A Thousand Ships” is really enjoyable (even for someone who has read a lot of the recent mythological retellings.) And I’m part way through reading “Hamnet” now - I’m enjoying it but not blown away by it yet (as many people have been) but it still might grab me.

I’m disappointed “Actress” and “The Dutch House” didn’t make the cut but that’s how prizes go!
How do you feel about the list? Any favourites or longlisted titles you’re sad not to see? Will you read all six before the winner is announced in September? I’m glad we have this to look forward to!

The Women’s Prize for Fiction Longlist 2020

As usual, I’ve been greatly anticipating what will be listed for this year’s Women’s Prize for Fiction and this year’s list was announced at midnight. Anna and I made a video speculating what might be on the list and between us we managed to guess eight out of the sixteen titles correctly! I’ve only read three of them but I am thrilled to see “Girl, Woman, Other”, “Weather” and “The Dutch House” listed as I think they are all brilliant in different ways. The rest of the novels are a great balance between books I’ve been eager to read and a couple (“Dominicana” and “Nightingale Point”) that I wasn’t previously aware of.

I’ve been meaning to read “A Thousand Ships” since Anna enthusiastically endorsed it before it was even published last year. “Queenie” is another one that’s been high on my TBR since it published and one I wanted to get to when it was listed for the Costa Book Awards a couple months ago. I was given a copy of “Girl” for Christmas and now I can grab it off my shelves. Anne Enright is one of my favourite authors so a new novel by her is always a cause for celebration and I’ve heard great things about “Actress”.  Jacqueline Woodson is an author I’ve always meant to read and “Red at the Bone”, her most recent novel for adults, has received great critical acclaim. As Anna mentioned in our video, “Dominicana” is a novel that’s often been mentioned amidst the whole “American Dirt” controversy within the lists of alternative suggestions for books by Latinx authors.

In the past couple of weeks I’ve been reading the first two novels in the Cromwell trilogy so I’m now fully on the Hilary Mantel train and ready for “The Mirror and the Light” which is coming out this week and without a doubt one of the publishing events of the year. The only trouble is that it’s over 900 pages long so it’s going to be a challenge to balance my reading of this alongside the other longlisted titles as well as books listed for this year’s International Booker Prize. Lots of reading ahead! The novel I’m most looking forward to is Maggie O’Farrell’s “Hamnet” which has amazing advance praise and is an author I’ve meant to read again since I loved her novel “This Must Be the Place”.

There’s an impressive mixture of really famous authors listed from recent Booker prize winner Bernardine Evaristo to previous Women’s Prize winner Ann Patchett as well as popular favourites such as Candice Carty-Williams and Claire Lombardo whose “The Most Fun We Ever Had” I’ve heard is a very funny novel as well as one of great quality. One of my favourite things about the prize is how it always presents a balanced group of novels that encourage readers to try books they probably wouldn’t have read otherwise. I’m planning to read most of the list and hope to discover some great fiction I might not have got to otherwise.

A shortlist of six novels will be announced on April 22nd and the winner on June 3rd. What do you think of this year’s list? Any favourites you’ve already read or books you’re keen to now read?

Weather by Jenny Offill

Although I read Offill’s novel “Dept. of Speculation” over five years ago during one joyously long reading session on a plane, it stands out in my mind as so stylistically unique with a voice that seamlessly blends humour with poignant critiques on love and modern life. Her new novel “Weather” uses a similar style of narrative while engaging more overtly with current politics and social anxiety. Rather than a linear story we’re presented with clipped sections of text surrounding the life of Lizzie Benson, a librarian and mother living on the east coast of America. Brief scenes from her life are interspersed with paragraphs from journals or jokes. Together these form an impression (rather than a complete portrait) of her life and a sense of being in the time proceeding and immediately after Trump’s election. Hanging over the book is its characters’ impending sense of doom and a need to develop survival strategies for what they assume to be an inevitable disaster. 

I love how close I came to feel with Lizzie even though the author consciously leaves out so many specifics and details about her life. It’s not exactly like stream of consciousness writing, but more like snapshots of experience that build to a wider worldview. She wryly notes encounters with some patrons at the library with their oddball questions or requests – this felt very true to life especially after reading about the kinds of encounters librarians must endure on a daily basis in Susan Orlean’s “The Library Book”. Throughout the book Lizzie will often recount facts or explain the background behind certain things. When she's asked at one point “How do you know all this?” she responds “I’m a fucking librarian.”

She also describes moments with her family from tender encounters to points of conflict. Her son might casually make a dismissive, insulting remark about her or there might be a description of her recovering drug addict brother Henry’s alarming erratic behaviour. Other times she'll reflect on the puzzling nature of relationships: “Funny how when you’re married all you want is to be anonymous to each other again, but when you’re anonymous all you want is to be married and reading together in bed.” Just a small snippet of dialogue or brief detail in this novel can unfold in a way that left me feeling I’d read a much longer and more fleshed out scene. It’s an impressive technique that compresses experience down to what’s most essential and impactful.

It's interesting to compare this novel to “Ducks, Newburyport”, one of my favourite books from last year. They both capture something essential about our modern day experience: how opinions are filtered through the media to form a consensus without proper debate or facts and how a profusion of news about global issues leads to deep-felt private anxiety. Lizzie has internalized this so much she often compares reality to the structure of a disaster movie and wryly notes how everyone assumes our planet must be soon abandoned: “Today NASA found seven new Earth-size planets. So there’s that.” But where Ellmann's novel brilliantly embraces the endless barrage of her protagonist's thoughts and the hilarious peculiarities of her internal logic, Offill presents a skilfully abbreviated view of one woman's reality as she navigates an increasingly absurd world. “Weather” is such a brilliant and accomplished novel.