The Women's Prize for Fiction 2024 Shortlist
The Women’s Prize for Fiction is one of the most successful, influential and popular literary prizes in the world, championing and amplifying women’s voices and nurturing a global community of readers. Below are the 6 shortlisted books this year.
River East, River West by Aube Rey Lescure is set in Shanghai in the mid 2000s and opens with a wedding. Fourteen-year-old Alva is dismayed that her American mother, Sloan, is marrying Lu Fang, a local businessman. The narrative flips between Alva and Lu Fang, bringing to life Chinese history and society from the Cultural Revolution onwards.
Isabella Hammad’s Enter Ghost tells the story of Sonia, a British-Palestinian actor, who goes to visit her sister in Israel. She is persuaded to join a local theatre troupe that is attempting, against the odds, to stage a production of Hamlet in the West Bank.
Restless Dolly Maunder by Kate Grenville is based on the life of the author’s grandmother, beginning on a sheep farm in New South Wales in 1881. Dolly fights constantly against the constraints placed on her as a woman in a man’s world, and pays a high price for her nonconformity. She builds a business, then loses everything and is forced to start over – but she never loses her fighting spirit.
Sashi, the protagonist of Brotherless Night by VV Ganeshananthan, begins her account of the Sri Lankan civil war with a prologue set in New York in 2009, before circling back to her childhood in Jaffna. She and her four brothers have bright futures ahead of them. Sashi is determined to become a doctor, an ambition she fulfils despite the war. But all of her brothers become, in very different ways, lost to her because of the conflict.
The Wren, The Wren by Anne Enright explores the messy, often fraught relationship between Carmel and her daughter, Nell, and the long shadow thrown over the family by Carmel’s famous poet father, Phil.
Another book that examines motherhood with searing honesty and originality is Soldier Sailor by Claire Kilroy. Addressed by a new mother to her infant son, it examines the unexpected grief about the life she’s lost, the brutal banalities of childcare and the overwhelming love she experiences.
Have a listen to the judges talk about each book, click here for YouTube video.
All the above books are available for collection in the shop or for home delivery.
