The 20 titles shortlisted for the Baileys Women’s prize for fiction – the award formerly known as the Orange – will be revealed tomorrow, so it’s time to make our predictions. “158 titles to discuss with 4 brilliant judges. What will we choose?” tweeted judge Helen Fraser yesterday. What, indeed?
From a glance at the literary blogs, some titles are mentioned as potential contenders again and again. Mrs Hemingway, by Naomi Wood. Americanah, by former Orange prize winner Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie. The Woman Upstairs by Claire Messud. The Booker-winning The Luminaries by Eleanor Catton.
At Farm Lane Books, blogger Jackie says it’s been “an amazing year for female writers”, and tips Donna Tartt’s The Goldfinch, Helen Oyeyemi’s Boy, Snow, Bird and Elizabeth Gilbert’s The Signature of All Things, among others. At The Writes of Women, they’re tipping Mr Loverman by Bernardine Evaristo, Eimear McBride’s Folio-shortlisted A Girl is a Half-Formed Thing, Helen Dunmore’s The Lie, Helen Walsh’s The Lemon Grove and Jill Dawson’s The Tell-Tale Heart.
A Case for Books throws in Hannah Kent’s Burial Rites, Louise Erdrich’s The Round House, Jhumpa Lahiri’s The Lowland, Rachel Kushner’s The Flamethrowers and Evie Wyld’s All the Birds, Singing.
Checking out Twitter would have you believe that Louise Doughty’s Apple Tree Yard and Meg Wolitzer’s The Interestings should also be in the running. (Yes, definitely, to the Doughty; haven’t read The Interestings).
At the Huffington Post, they’re hoping that more “commercial” fiction will get a look in this year, and that, with the rebrand, the award won’t be “something purely for the broadsheet elite” – that it’ll be repositioned, “(like the drink it’s now named after) as something warm and inclusive, something feelgood and enjoyable”. Authors cited include Lisa Jewell, Natalie Young, Adele Parks and Rowan Coleman.
My hope? That the judges notice the Australian author Chloe Hooper’s scarily intense The Engagement, in which an English architect begins a relationship with an Australian cattle magnate. So far, so Mills & Boon, but it quickly spirals into nightmare, as Liese, the architect, finds herself locked in Alexander the cattle man’s remote, dark, suffocating house. Hooper was shortlisted for the Orange for her debut, A Child’s Book of True Crime; The Engagement is her second novel. And it is a fine, literary thriller; cold, at times almost nauseatingly disturbing.
There’s a fantastic section where Liese walks through a dark hallway in Alexander’s mansion, trying the closed doors, a scream waiting in her throat. She finds a room, preserved from the past, “a scene trapped in amber”. Very Bluebeard. Even the food Alexander cooks takes on an air of menace, the kidneys “soft and firm and dense and pissy”. And there’s something off about the beauty of the bush. “We’d just driven over the rise and seen the mountains. It was as though a backdrop had fallen, perhaps the wrong one,” Liese tells us. The birdsong is dissonant. “White cockatoos clung to these branches and the air was filled with their dinning: a killing sound like nothing I’d heard before.”
It’s hard not to love an author who can write like this: “Cold surged through me – I had invited him into my most private room. Once there, he’d taken my fantasy and bent it out of shape. Bent it until, by the thinnest, finest chance, I found I’d slid somewhere dank, unknown. I was inside the room in his head and he had locked the door.”
So, The Engagement: my bet. How about you? We’ve got a day to come up with our predictions before judges Caitlin Moran, Mary Beard, Helen Fraser, Denise Mina and Sophie Raworth announce their own picks for the £30,000 award’s longlist.
