The Longlist For The Baileys Womens Prize for Fiction 2016
20 new books to add to your reading list
By Team ELLE and None
The twenty longlisted novels for this year’s Baileys Women’s Prize for Fiction include 11 debuts and 7 British writers.
Taking in 20th century Australia, the Second World War and outer space, it’s a list that’s pleasingly broad in its scope.
Anne Enright’s The Green Road and Hanya Yanagihara’s A Little Life are now familiar faces on awards lists but I’m particularly excited to see Kate Atkinson’s phenomenal A God in Ruins finally getting the attention it deserves.
One of our picks for the Best New Books of 2016 made the list - Shirley Barrett’s charming novel of proto-feminism and whaling, Rush Oh!, and Elizabeth McKenzie’s witty, clever The Portable Veblen, one of our favourite books of 2016 so far.
Here are the openings of the twenty longlisted books to give you a taste in advance of the shortlist being revealed on the 11th April.
Words by ELLE Literary Editor Anna James
1
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A Dictionary of Mutual Understanding by Jackie Copleton
“Even the kindness of the half-light could not hide his disfigurement. The man stood on my doorstep hunched against the chill of a winter morning. Despite the scarring, I could tell he was Japanese, in his forties or fifties. I had seen such burns before, blacker versions, in another life.”
2
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A Little Life by Hanya Yanagihara
“The eleventh apartment had only one closet, but it did have a sliding glass door that opened onto a small balcony, from which he could see a man sitting across the way, outdoors in only a T-shirt and shorts even though it was October, smoking. Willem held up a hand in greeting to him, but the man didn’t wave back.”
3
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At Hawthorn Time by Melissa Harrison
“Here’s where it all ends: a long, straight road between fields. Four thirty on a May morning, the black fading to blue, dawn gathering somewhere below the treeline in the east. Imagine a Roman road. No, go back further: imagine a broad track, in use for centuries by the tribes who lives and fought and died on these islands, whose blood lives on in us.”
4
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Girl at War by Sara Novic
“The war in Zagreb began over a pack of cigarettes. There had been tensions beforehand, rumors of disturbances in other towns whispered above my head, but no explosions, nothing outright.”
5Unknown
Gorsky by Vesna Goldsworthy
“It was a piece of business that comes along once in a lifetime. If you are lucky. First there was a year of glamorous parties: an unexpected, undeserved year, unlike anything I had ever experienced. Then it all suddenly stopped and I had to return to what I was before, to a different language and a different place. Gorsky changed my life.”
6Unknown
A God in Ruins by Kate Atkinson
“He walked as far as the hedge that signalled the end of the airfield. The beating of the bounds. The men referred to it as his daily constitutional and fretted when he didn’t take it. They were superstitious. Everyone was superstitious.”
7Unknown
My Name is Lucy Barton by Elizabeth Strout
“There was a time, and it was many years ago now, when I had to stay in a hospital for almost nine weeks. This was in New York City, and at night a view of the Chrysler Builsing, with its geometric brilliance of lights, was directly visible from my bed. During the day, the building’s beauty receded, and gradually it became simply one more large structure against a blue sky, and all the city’s buildings seemed remote, silent, far away.”
8Unknown
Pleasantville by Attica Locke
“They partied in Pleasantville that night, from Laurentide to Demaree Lane. They unscrewed bottle tops, set the needle on a few records, left dinner dishes soaking in the sink. They sat on leather sofas in front of color TVs; hovered over kitchen radios; kept the phone lines hot, passing gossip on percentages and precinct returns, on the verge, they knew, of realising the dream of their lifetime, the ripe fruit of decades of labor and struggle.”
9Unknown
Ruby by Cynthia Bond
“Ruby Bell was a constant reminder of what could befall a woman whose shoe heels were too high. The people of Liberty Township wove her into cautionary tales of the wages of sin and travel.”
10Unknown
Rush Oh! by Shirley Barrett
“Our house was situated up the hill from the try-works, which meant not only were we enveloped in the stench of boiling blubber for five months of the year, but also that our garden must needs incorporate various vestiges of dead marine life.”
11Unknown
The Anatomist’s Dream by Clio Gray
“‘It’s a taupe,’ announced the doctor, poking at the lump with a scratchy yellow finger, ‘a French tumour they call it, though couldn’t rightly tell you why. Most unusual - got a bit of hair growing on it too, see here?’”
12Unknown
The Book of Memory by Petina Gappah
“The story that you have asked me to tell you does not begin with the pitiful ugliness of Lloyd’s death. It begins on a long-ago day in August when the sun seared my blistered face and I was nine years old and my father and mother sold me to a strange man.”
13Unknown
The Glorious Heresies by Lisa McInerney
“He left the boy outside its own front door. Farewell to it, and good luck to it. He wasn’t going to feed it anymore; from here on it would be squared shoulders and jaws, and strong arms and best feet forward.”
14Unknown
The Green Road by Anne Enright
“Later, after Hanna made some cheese on toast, her mother came into the kitchen and filled a hot water bottle from the big kettle on the range. ‘Go on up to your uncle’s for me, will you?’ she said. ‘Get me some Solpadeine.’”
15Unknown
The House at the Edge of the World by Julia Rochester
“When I was eighteen, my father fell off a cliff. It was a stupid way to die. There was a good moon. There was no wind. There was no excuse. He was pissing into the chine at Brock Tor on his way home from the pub and fell headlong drunk into the spring tide with his flies open.”
16Unknown
The Improbability of Love by Hannah Rothschild
“It was going to be the sale of the century. From first light a crowd had started gathering and by the late afternoon it stretched from the monumental grey portico of the auction house, Monachorum & Sons (est. 1756), across the wide pavement and out into Houghton Street.”
17Unknown
The Long Way to a Small, Angry Planet by Becky Chambers
“As she woke up in the pod, she remembered three things. First, she was travelling through open space. Second, she was about to start a new job, one she could not screw up. Third, she had bribed a government official into giving her a new identity file.”
18Unknown
The Portable Veblen by Elizabeth McKenzie
“Huddled together on the last block of Tasso Street, in a California town known as Palo Alto, was a pair of humble bungalows, each one aplot in lilies. And in one lived a woman in the slim green spring of her life, and her name was Veblen Amundsen-Hovda.”
19Unknown
The Secret Chord by Geraldine Brooks
“A man alone in a room. Not such an extraordinary thing. Yet as I stepped into the chamber I had a sense of something out of place.”
20Unknown
Whispers Through a Megaphone by Rachel Elliott
“Miriam Delaney sits at her kitchen table and watches the radio. She is mesmerized, transfixed. Inside a studio somewhere - somewhere in the outside world - a woman is speaking in the fullest of voices about her extraordinary life: the adventures, the flings, the lessons she mined from her mistakes.”
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