2013 Women's Prize for Fiction Nominees

On Wednesday, March 13^th, the 2013 Women’s Prize for Fiction long list was announced. We are thrilled to extend congratulations to Hachette UK author Ros Barber for The Marlowe Papers, Hachette Book Group author Maria Semple for Where’d You Go, Bernadette and Hyperion author Deborah Copaken Kogan for The Red Book! These women are among the finalists for the $45,000 Women’s Prize (formally the Orange Prize), which honours a work of fiction written in English by a woman.  The shortlist will be decided by a panel of judges, and will be announced sometime in April, and the winner in June.

 The Nominees 

The Marlow Papers Hodder 9781444730241 $15.99 CDN Pub Date: 5/7/2013 Paperback

On May 30th, 1593, a celebrated young playwright was killed in a tavern brawl in London. Or so the official version goes. Now Christopher Marlowe tells us the truth: that his ‘death’ was an elaborate ruse to avoid prosecution for heresy; that he lived on in lonely exile, pining for his true love from across the Channel; and that he continued to write plays and poetry, hiding behind the name of a colourless merchant from Stratford – one William Shakespeare.

Where’d You Go, Bernadette Little, Brown and Company 9780316204262 $16.50 CDN Pub Date: 4/2/2013 Paperback

Bernadette Fox is notorious. To her Microsoft-guru husband, she’s a fearlessly opinionated partner; to fellow private-school mothers in Seattle, she’s a disgrace; to design mavens, she’s a revolutionary architect, and to 15-year-old Bee, she is a best friend and, simply, Mum.

Then Bernadette disappears. It began when Bee aced her report card and claimed her promised reward: a family trip to Antarctica. But Bernadette’s intensifying allergy to Seattle – and people in general – has made her so agoraphobic that a virtual assistant in India now runs her most basic errands. A trip to the end of the earth is problematic.

To find her mother, Bee compiles email messages, official documents, secret correspondence–creating a compulsively readable and touching novel about misplaced genius and a mother and daughter’s role in an absurd world.

The Red Book Hyperion 9781401341992 $17.50 CDN Pub Date: 5/7/2013 Paperback

Clover, Addison, Mia and Jane were college roommates until their graduation from Harvard in 1989. Now, twenty years later, their lives are in free-fall. Clover, once a securities broker with Lehman Brothers and living the Manhattan dream, is out of a job, newly married and fretting about having a baby. Addison’s marriage to a novelist with writer’s block is as stale as her artistic ‘career’. Mia’s acting ambitions never got off the ground, and she stays home with her four children, renovating and acquiring faster than her Hollywood director husband can pay the bills. Jane, former Paris bureau chief for a newspaper and the victim of budget cuts, has been blindsided by different sorts of loss.

The four friends have kept up with one another via the Red Book, published every five years, in which alumni write brief updates about their lives. But there’s the story we tell the world, and then there’s the real story, as the classmates arriving at their twentieth reunion with their families, histories, dashed dreams and secret longings, will discover over the course of an epoch-ending, score-settling, unforgettable weekend.

For more information on the nominees and the complete long list visit the Women’s Prize Fiction website: http://www.womensprizeforfiction.co.uk/2013-prize/longlist.