This annual literary award by The Guardian newspaper
recognises one book by a new writer. Check out the shortlist here...
We Need New Names by
NoViolet Bulawayo
'To play the country-game, we have to choose a country.
Everybody wants to be the USA and Britain and Canada and Australia and
Switzerland and them. Nobody wants to be
rags of countries like Congo, like Somalia, like Iraq, like Sudan, like Haiti
and not even this one we live in - who wants to be a terrible place of hunger
and things falling apart?' Darling and her friends live in a shanty called
Paradise, which of course is no such thing. It isn't all bad, though. There's
mischief and adventure, games of Find bin Laden, stealing guavas, singing Lady
Gaga at the tops of their voices. They
dream of the paradises of America, Dubai, Europe, where Madonna and Barack
Obama and David Beckham live. For Darling, that dream will come true. But, like
the thousands of people all over the world trying to forge new lives far from
home, Darling finds this new paradise brings its own set of challenges - for
her and also for those she's left behind.
Sex and the Citadel : Intimate Life in a Changing Arab World
by Shereen El-Feki
As political change sweeps the streets and squares,
parliaments and presidential palaces of the Arab world, Shereen El Feki has
been looking at upheaval a little closer to home - in the sexual lives of men
and women in Egypt and across the region. The result is an informative,
insightful and engaging account of a highly sensitive, and still largely
secret, aspect of Arab society. Sex is entwined in religion and tradition,
politics and economics, gender and generations, so it makes the perfect lens
for examining the region's complex social landscape. From pregnant virgins to desperate
housewives, from fearless activists to religious firebrands, Sex and the
Citadel takes a fresh look at the sexual history of the Arab region, and brings
new voices to the debate over its future. This is no peep show or academic
treatise. Sex and the Citadel is a highly personal, often humorous, account of
one woman's journey to better understand Arab society at its most intimate, and
in the process, better understand her own origins. Rich with five years of groundbreaking
research from Egypt to Saudi Arabia, Tunisia to Qatar, Sex and the Citadel
gives us unique and timely insight into everyday lives in a part of the world
that is changing in front of our very eyes.
The Spinning Heart by Donal Ryan
"My father still lives back the road past the weir in
the cottage I was reared in. I go there every day to see is he dead and every
day he lets me down. He hasn't yet
missed a day of letting me down." In the aftermath of Ireland's financial
collapse, dangerous tensions surface in an Irish town. As violence flares, the
characters face a battle between public persona and inner desires. Through a
chorus of unique voices, each struggling to tell their own kind of truth, a
single authentic tale unfolds. The
Spinning Heart speaks for contemporary Ireland like no other novel. Wry,
vulnerable, all-too human, it captures the language and spirit of rural Ireland
and with uncanny perception articulates the words and thoughts of a generation.
Technically daring and evocative of Patrick McCabe and J.M. Synge, this novel of small-town life is
witty, dark and sweetly poignant. Donal Ryan's brilliantly realized debut
announces a stunning new voice in literary fiction.
Burial Rites by Hannah Kent
In northern Iceland, 1829, Agnes Magnusdottir is condemned
to death for her part in the brutal murder of her lover. Agnes is sent to wait
out her final months on the farm of district officer Jon Jonsson, his wife and
their two daughters. Horrified to have a
convicted murderer in their midst, the family avoid contact with Agnes. Only
Toti, the young assistant priest appointed Agnes's spiritual guardian, is
compelled to try to understand her. As the year progresses and the hardships of
rural life force the household to work side by side, Agnes's story begins to
emerge and with it the family's terrible realization that all is not as they
had assumed. Based on actual events,
Burial Rites is an astonishing and moving novel about the truths we claim to
know and the ways in which we interpret what we're told. In beautiful,
cut-glass prose, Hannah Kent portrays Iceland's formidable landscape, in which
every day is a battle for survival, and asks, how can one woman hope to endure
when her life depends upon the stories told by others?
Kiss Me First by Lottie Moggach
Leila has never met Tess, but she now knows more about Tess
than anyone in the world. She's read all of her emails, researched her past and
asked Tess for every detail about her friends and family. Tess has never met
Leila. But if she wants to slip away from
the world unnoticed, she needs to trust Leila with her life. At first, Leila
finds it easy to assume Tess's identity, and no one has any reason to distrust
her. But as Leila is soon to discover, there is much more to a person than the
facts and there are things about life you can learn only by living it
...Original, haunting and utterly gripping, Kiss Me First is an electrifying
debut from a phenomenally gifted storyteller.
