Orange Prize Shortlist 2011

Winner to be announced 8^th June

Room by Emma Donoghue :  It's Jack's birthday, and he's excited about turning five. Jack lives with his Ma in Room, which has a locked door and a skylight, and measures 12 feet by 12 feet. He loves watching TV, and the cartoon characters he calls friends, but he knows that nothing he sees on screen is truly real - only him, Ma and the things in Room. Until the day Ma admits that there's a world outside... Told in Jack's voice, 'Room' is the story of a mother and son whose love lets them survive the impossible. Unsentimental and sometimes funny, devastating yet uplifting, this is a novel like no other.

The Memory Of Love by Aminatta Forna:  The latest novel from the author of 'Ancestor Stones' and runner up for the 2003 Samuel Johnson Prize for 'The Devil That Dances on the Water'. In an African city, an elderly and unwell man, Elias Cole, a former lecturer now living alone with his manservant, Babagaleh, reflects on his past. Carefully recorded in a series of now-frayed notebooks are memories of youth in England, the details of an obsession: Saffia, a woman he loved, and Julius, her charismatic, unpredictable husband, a colleague of Elias's at the university. 'The Memory of Love' is a novel about understanding our pasts and an examination of the very nature of obsessive love.

Grace Williams Says It Loud by Emma Henderson:  This isn't an ordinary love story, but then Grace isn't an ordinary girl. On her first day at the Briar Mental institute, Grace meets Daniel. He sees a different Grace: someone to share secrets and canoodle with, someone to fight for. Debonair Daniel, who can type with his feet, fills Grace's head will tales from Paris and the world beyond. This is Grace's story; her life, its betrayals and triumphs, disappointment and loss, the taste of freedom; roses, music and tiny scraps of paper. Most of all it is about the love of a lifetime. This novel is based on the life of the author's sister, who grew up in a mental hospital.

Great House by Nicole Krauss:  George Weisz has spent his entire life in the pursuit of a single aim: to recreate his father's study exactly as it was that evening in 1938 when the Nazis arrived and the family home was abandoned forever. Sixty years later, one final piece of the puzzle remains to be found. Someone whom he least suspects knows exactly where it is. Meanwhile, halfway across the globe a son returns to confront his father after 25 years abroad. Haunted by his experiences in the Israeli army, he leaves their house each dusk and goes walking through the night. This is the search for meaning in the face of unbearable truths.

Tigers Wife by Tea Obreht:  During WWII, an escaped tiger from Belgrade Zoo held a village in terrified thrall. But for one boy, it was a thing of magic - Shere Khan awoken from the pages of The Jungle Book. Natalia, a doctor, the granddaughter of that boy, is visiting orphanages after another devastating war when she hears of her grandfather's death, far from home, in mysterious circumstances. From stories he used to tell her, she thinks he may have died searching for 'the deathless man', a vagabond said to be immortal. Struggling to understand him, a clue leads her to a tattered copy of The Jungle Book, and to the extraordinary story of the tiger's wife.. A mesmerising and timeless novel.

Annabel by Kathleen Winter:  In 1968, into the beautiful, spare environment of remote coastal Labrador in the far north-east of Canada, a mysterious child is born: a baby who appears to be neither fully boy nor girl, but both at once. Only three people share the secret – the baby’s parents, Jacinta and Treadway, and a trusted neighbour, Thomasina. Together the adults make a difficult decision: to go through surgery and raise the child as a boy named Wayne. But as Wayne grows up within the hyper-male hunting culture of his father, his shadow-self – a girl he thinks of as ‘Annabel’ – is never entirely extinguished, and indeed is secretly nurtured by the women in his life. As Wayne approaches adulthood, and its emotional and physical demands, the woman inside him begins to cry out. The changes that follow are momentous not just for him, but for the three adults that have guarded his secret.