The Woman's Prize Longlist is Ready for your Bookshelf!

The 2020 judging panel; ; writer and activist Scarlett Curtis, writer and activist, Melanie Eusebe, co-founder of the Black British Business Awards, author and comedian Viv Groskop and Paula Hawkins, international bestselling author and Chair of the Judges Martha Lane Fox.

Hamnet by Maggie O’ Farrell - WINNER OF THE WOMEN'S PRIZE 2020

I admit it; I'd never read a Maggie O'Farrell novel. That has certainly had a turnaround.

O'Farrell doesn't write historical novels as a rule, but this is set around the time that Shakespeare's son, Hamnet dies at the age of 11. Four years later, Shakespeare wrote Hamlet, changing only one letter of his son's name.

The Guardian says; Hamnet is quite unlike anything O'Farrell has written before. There is an elliptical, dreamlike quality to her prose in Hamnet that, though not obviously steeped in 16th-century language, is essential to creating a world that feels at once wholly tangible and somehow otherworldly, as if the membrane between the natural and supernatural was more porous then. The depth of her research is evident on every page. Anyone who has visited Shakespeare’s birthplace will recognise her descriptions of his former home, but O’Farrell plunges the reader into the vivid life of the house, with its smells of a glover’s workshop, the heat and bustle of a cookhouse, the physical effort of planting a garden or twisting out newly washed sheets. They go on to add; At its heart, though, this is a book about grief, and the means by which people find their way through it.

True, but only half the story. Please note THIS BOOK IS NOT ABOUT SHAKESPEARE; IT'S ABOUT WOMEN. His wife, his daughters, his mother, his mother-in-law and his wife's dead natural mother. Shakespeare is not even named; he's called the Latin Tutor, the son, the husband, the father, the playwright. Agnes, who he marries when he is 19 and she is well into her twenties, is a cunning woman and herbalist, needed but slightly mistrusted by the community. We are in her head most of the time, as her daughter succumbs to the plague, and Agnes is so intent on nursing her back to health, that she fails to notice the girl's twin is slowly dying. 

This is a book that will make you cry and laugh. At times, you'll be desperately turning the pages and at others you'll re-read the lyrical prose time and again. This is my book of 2020. If you don't read it, you will never know your lack.

Girl, Woman, Other by Bernardine Evaristo 

Girl, Woman, Other follows the lives and struggles of twelve-plus characters. Mostly women, black and British, they tell the stories of their families, friends and lovers, across the country and through the years. This is a worthy book, Each story is wonderful, each a vibrant account of women’s lives, taking stories in the past and following them through the decades, presenting a diverse spectrum of mostly, but not inclusively, the lives off black women in Britain and the US.

This story uses polyphony, a writing technique in which many perspectives tell the story. This creates a book that feels like a choral work (alto, mezzo and soprano only, of course), allowing layers of contradiction, similarity and identification. This means Evaristo can create a nuanced and complex narrative, but one where we move quickly, with a feeling of overall control, through time and space and people’s lives. To give her story about so many women a seamless feel, Evaristo choses an interesting device within her narration, in that she uses no full stops; I thought I would find this off putting, but instead of the normal convention of sentences and paragraphs, she simply breaks off wherever she wants to…

Amma then spent decades on the fringe, a renegade lobbing hand grenades at the establishment that excluded her

until the…

…and then takes off again in the same breath. In my head, I put punctuation in these gaps and that worked for me.  

Because of what she wanted to achieve, Everisto went for a lot of exposition. Exposition is a literary device used to introduce information about events, settings, characters, or other elements of a work. A certain amount of exposition is crucial to any story, but using too much can dull the feel of the narrative. Exposition can get you from one time and place to another through a wormhole (like the passage above does), but  it means that Everisto is frequently telling, rather than showing the story of so many women through the 20th century and into the 21st. I loved what she was trying to do, and loved the characters; they are massive, full of life and fight, and the subject matter is important and well realised, but I struggled  with the narrative voice, which at certain points, left me cold as we fast-forwarded time and again.

Dominicana by Angie Cruz 

Angie Cruz.
Photograph: ©Erika Morillo/The Shipman Agency

‘My sweet, hollow Dominicana will keep all my secrets,’ whispers Ana Canción, trapped in the Washington Heights apartment of her husband. Seventeen years her senior, Juan Ruiz is a cruel and mean man, stealing her away from her family in the Dominican Republic with the promise that she will receive a New York education and her family’ll get Green Cards.

Then one day, Ruiz has to go away, and leaves his brother to keep an eye on his prisoner wife. César has no interest in being cruel or mean. He takes Ana to Coney Island and the Audubon Ballroom. He helps her find a job. She hides her wages inside Dominicana, a hollow ceramic doll that, in an ominous symbolism of her own entrapment, has neither eyes nor mouth.

Cruzl was apparently inspired to write this third novel after learning about her own mother’s past. Her mother was skeptical that such a book would work. ‘Who would be interested in a story about a woman like me? It’s so typical.’  Ana echoes this disbarring approach. ‘Nobody cares about us,' she tells César. He gives her pen and paper and tells her to write her story.

The Mirror and the Light by Hilary Mantel

We’ve waited a long time for this final instalment; already the two other books in this series have become a historic drama on television…and the series is already historic in itself. I loved Wolf Hall and Bring up the Bodies. I'm enamoured of the way Mantel approaches her subject…both the man, Thomas Cromwell, born of a cruel blacksmith, but rising to run Henry VIIIth's England––and the period, the way we see intimately into the Tudor Court. Her imagining of this time is supported by wonderful use of muscular language… Katherine’s miscarried children, their blind faces and their vestigial hands joined in prayer…and she gets right under the skin of the characters, so that we feel we know them intimately. showing Cromwell as…soiled in life’s battle, so seamed and scarred, so unwanted, so cold.

Before Mantel, it could be said that Cromwell wasthe most disliked, possiblyone of the most hated man in the history of our land, along with King John and Jack the Ripper. But she humanises him, as a man who loved his dead wife and wants the best for his children, a man with a sense of humour and a great intellect. She doesn’t sentimentalise his life, but she  does show him in this last of the trilogy as rather haunted. He’s appointed to the Privy Council and immediately, his enemies begin to circle him like wolves, until the rumours have him thrown in the Tower, and the man who was responsible for so much torture becomes the interrogated.  

What a trilogy to have written! Mantel has shown a mirror and a light to a shadowy figure from a dark past and I ended up feeling as if I knew him well.

A Thousand Ships by Natalie Haynes

I’ve read many stories that reinvent Troy and the Trojan war; it's a fascinating subject, considered both fact and myth. Recently, I read Pat Barker's The Silence of the Girls. She takes the viewpoint of Briseis, one of the camp-girls of the Greeks, raped regularly when they weren't cookinig and cleaning. I thought Briseis  a great narrator, and if Barker had stayed in her point of view, I would have loved this book. But Barker couldn't resist going into the male viewpoint, so that we can be on the battlefield and in the tents of the generals. Barker forgot she wanted to tell the silence of those girls, and instead decided to tell the story of the entire battle. A mistake, which spoilt this book for me. 

Natalie Haynes; Photograph credit James Betts
https://www.nataliehaynes.com

A Thousand Ships  is also told from an all-female perspective. Natelie Haynes is a  writer, broadcaster, reviewer and classicist who was once a stand-up comic, but retired when she realised she preferred tragedy to comedy. She describes herself a feminist, and she  sticks closely to the perspective of life of  women in the Trojan Era.  This novel gives voices to the women, who for so long have been silent.  She covers not only the timespan of the Iliad, (which isn't long) or the length of the war (ten years) but extends the timeframe to show the events that led up to the Trojan War, the fall of Troy and its aftermath. One of the many characters, each with their own short chapter, is Briseis, but many of the other camp-girls also have a voice, as do stay-at-home wives like Penelope and Clytemnestra. Helen's voice is heard clear and loud, and goddesses like Calliope and Aphrodite are in here. Even Gaia gets a say.

A Thousand Ships has already been voted one of the Guardian's and TLS's 'Best Books of 2019'. It's been described as 'for fans of Barker and Miller' and I would second that.  Madeline Miller's 'The Song of Achilles', is one of my lifetime favourites, but it's all about the boys, taking the perspective of Patroclus from the moment he met Achilles as a boy to the end of Achilles' life. Starting when Patroclus is nine years old and finishing long after the Iliad finishes, Miller uses an intimate first-person present tense narrative, and fair rips along. I loved the way Miller plays with the solid classical pedigree of these Greek stories, how she builds figures that long ago became archetypal into real characters, and how she re-imagines the world of bronze-aged Greece and Turkey.

Weather by Jenny Offill

Weather by Jenny Offill
‘shows us what we are selfishly ignoring’. Photograph: Christopher Lane, The Guardian

In 2014, I read two books described as 'a sort of new writing'; Rachel Cusk’s Outline and Jenny Offill’s Dept. of Speculation.  I began to like 'autofiction'. This descibes a book that blurs the boundaries between novel and memoir. In fact, I also think this is a legitimate way of writing memoir, as if it's fiction, and even of writing biography...almost, this brings us back to the Mantel trilogy. 

Six years later Offill has created what might be called another kind of book altogher. Always known for her brevity (Dept. of Speculation was described as 'not so much a novel as the X-ray of one'), Weather uses extremely short paragraphs and is barely novella-length. Her style can be dense, but none of that should put a reader off. Here is the opening line; In the morning, the one who is mostly enlightened comes in. There are stages and she is in the second to last, she thinks. This stage can be described only by a Japanese word. ‘Bucket of black paint’ it means. Surely that can't help but get you reading!

Lizzie Benson feels a bit helpless, confronted with of modern life. Don't we all? A university campus librarian married to Ben, who works in IT, they have one son. Surely they are the 'every-couple, filled with 21st century wit;

I wish you were a real shrink, my husband said, then we’d be rich.…I can only imagine what it would be like to be this age and in love,’ I tell Ben. ‘You are in love,’ he corrects me…He keeps touching my arm, this guy. Sometimes your heart runs away with someone and all it takes is a bandana on a stick…Last night, his wife put a piece of paper on the fridge. Is what you’re doing right now making money?”…

Autofiction has been attacked for its solipsism, the theory that the self is all that can be known to exist...which admittedly can allow a slide towards being self-centred or selfish. Although some books are written in a ego-centrtic style, I still think that autofiction has a huge part to play in narrative writing. As Offill says in Weather; the core delusion is that I am here and you are there.

Winner Announced in September

So, there it is my thoughts on the 25th longlist. These six books may not actually be the best six written by women in the last 12 months. That's not what the Women's Prize is about. It's there to get us reading, reading female writers. 

Martha Lane Fox says; We are all living in challenging, sad and complex times so incredible stories provide hope, a moment of escape and a point of connection now more than ever. Choosing the shortlist was tough – we went slowly and carefully and passions ran high – just as you would want in such a process. But we are all so proud of these books – all readers will find solace if they pick one up.

I hope this run-down of the list helps you decide which you have the time to read. As I point out above, we've probably got the time to read all six before the winner is announced on Wednesday the 9th of September.

Who will it be? Evaristo has already (jointly) won the Booker. Mantel has a clutch of prizes; does she deserve this one too? Or will the four less decorated novels get a chance. Often The Women's Prize (AKA previously as the Orange Prize and the Bailey's Prize) has a reputation for going off piste and chosing an outsider. 

Only by reading them all can we take an educated guess. 

Or put money on it.

Happy reading until then!

STOP PRESS!

 Right now, I have a new copy of  Abook to give away. 

To win Rewild Yourself  by Simon Barnes, all you have to do is email me at kitchentablewriters@live.com. Please write one or two sentences telling me why you think you should be sent the free book (UK only please).