Orange Broadband Prize shortlist announced

Date: April 18, 2007 | Discussion: No Comments

The 2007 shortlist for the Orange Broadband Prize for Fiction has been announced. The highly prestigious UK award is given annually to the best original full-length novel written by a female author in English, and published in the UK in the preceding year. The winner of the prize receives £30,000.

This year’s shortlisted authors are:

Half of a Yellow Sun
by Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie

The sweeping novel from the author of ‘Purple Hibiscus’, shortlisted for the Orange Prize, and winner of the Commonwealth Writers Award. This highly anticipated novel from Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie is set in Nigeria during the 1960s, at the time of a vicious civil war in which a million people died and thousands were massacred in cold blood. The three main characters in the novel are swept up in the violence during these turbulent years. One is a young boy from a poor village who is employed at a university lecturer’s house. The other is a young middle-class woman, Olanna, who has to confront the reality of the massacre of her relatives. And the third is a white man, a writer who lives in Nigeria for no clear reason, and who falls in love with Olanna’s twin sister, a remote and enigmatic character. As these people’s lives intersect, they have to question their own responses to the unfolding political events. This extraordinary novel is about Africa in a wider sense: about moral responsibility, about the end of colonialism, about ethnic allegiances, about class and race; and about the ways in which love can complicate all of these things. …

You can read more about Half of a Yellow Sun at Amazon.com and Amazon.co.uk

Arlington Park
by Rachel Cusk

Amid the leafy avenues and comfortable houses, the residents of Arlington park live out the dubious accomplishments of civilisation: material prosperity, personal freedom, and moral indifference. Men work, women look after children, and people generally do what’s expected of them. Set over the course of a single rainy day, this novel moves from one household to another, and through the passing hours conducts a deep examination of its characters’ lives: of Juliet, enranged at the victory of men over women in family life; of Amanda, warding off thoughts of death with obsessive housework; of Solly, who confronts her own buried femininity in the person of her Italian lodger; of Maisie, despairing at the inevitability with which beauty is destroyed; and of Christine, whose troubled, hilarious spirit presides over Arlington Park and the way of life it represents. …

You can read more about Arlington Park at Amazon.com and Amazon.co.uk

The Inheritance of Loss
by Kiran Desai

At the foot of Mount Kanchenjunga in the Himalayas, lives an embittered old judge who wants nothing more than to retire in peace. But with the arrival of his orphaned granddaughter, Sai, and his cook’s son trying to stay a step ahead of US immigration services, this is far from easy. When a Nepalese insurgency threatens Sai’s blossoming romance with her handsome tutor they are forced to consider their colliding interests. The judge must revisit his past, his own journey and his role in this grasping world of conflicting desires every moment holding out the possibility for hope or betrayal. …

You can read more about The Inheritance of Loss at Amazon.com and Amazon.co.uk

A Concise Chinese-English Dictionary for Lovers
by Xiaolu Guo

Z is a 23-year-old Chinese language student who has come to London to learn English. When the book begins she can barely ask for a cup of tea, but when language comes, so does love. As she gets to know British culture she also falls for an older English man who lives a resolutely bachelor life in Hackney. It’s a million miles away from the small Chinese town she comes from, where her parents want nothing more for her than that she should follow them into the shoe business. Z learns about sex, humour, companionship and passion, but she also learns the painful truth that language is also a barrier and the more you know about it, the less you understand. Written in short chapters, each the definition of a word, this is a brilliantly clever book that pokes fun at England and China and explores the endless possibilities for misunderstanding between East and West, men and women. …

You can read more about A Concise Chinese-English Dictionary for Lovers at Amazon.com and Amazon.co.uk

The Observations
by Jane Harris

Scotland, 1863. In an attempt to escape her not-so-innocent past in Glasgow, Bessy Buckley—a wide-eyed and feisty young Irish girl—takes a job as a maid in a big house outside Edinburgh working for the beautiful Arabella—the “missus.” Bessy lacks the necessary scullery skills for her new position, but as she finds out, it is her ability to read and write that makes her such a desirable property. Bessy is intrigued by her new employer but puzzled by her increasingly strange requests and her insistence that Bessy keep a journal of her mundane chores and most intimate thoughts. And it seems that the missus has a few secrets of her own, including her near- obsessive affection for Nora, a former maid who died in mysterious circumstances. …

You can read more about The Observations at Amazon.com and Amazon.co.uk

Digging to America
by Anne Tyler

Friday August 15th, 1997. Two tiny Korean babies are delivered to Baltimore to two families with nothing in common. First there are the Donaldsons, decent Brad and homespun Bitsy and a host of relatives, taking delivery with characteristic American razzmatazz. Then there are the Yazdans, pretty, nervous Ziba and carefully assimilated Sami, with his elegant Iranian-born widowed mother Maryam, receiving their little bundle with wondering discretion. Every year, on the anniversary of ‘Arrival Day’ the two families celebrate together, with increasingly elaborately competitive parties, as tiny, delicate Susan and wholesome, stocky Jin-ho, take roots and become American. …

You can read more about Digging to America at Amazon.com and Amazon.co.uk

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