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The Women’s Prize for Fiction is the UK’s most prestigious annual book award celebrating & honouring fiction written by women.
This year’s winner was announced as The Book Of Form And Emptiness by Ruth Ozeki. Our review is below, along with the rest of the very strong shortlist from this year.
Ozeki’s latest breathtaking novel encapsulates grief, mental illness and Zen Buddhism in an engrossing story about the connections we make to people and the world around us.
Following the tragic death of his father, teenager Benny Oh begins to hear voices coming from objects around him. As his mother spirals down into the depths of depression and compulsive hoarding, Benny struggles to cope with the cacophony in his head. Out of this darkness, they will find unlikely connections which could save them both and bring meaning out of chaos.
Given the subject matter, at times The Book Of Form And Emptiness can be an upsetting read. However, the author’s non-judgemental take on the difficult subject of mental illness, and the weaving of Zen Buddhism threads among the story turn what could have been a depressing book into an inspiring and uplifting one.
A surprisingly intimate and thoughtful novel which explores how we cope with loss and how we find help from unlikely places.
(review by Cliff)
The Great Circle
Maggie Shipstead
As Marion Graves, intrepid explorer, is about to fulfil her greatest ambition, to circumnavigate the globe from pole to pole, she crash lands in a perilous wilderness of ice. Over half a century later, troubled film star Hadley Baxter is drawn inexorably to play the enigmatic pilot on screen. It is a role that will lead her to an unexpected discovery, throwing fresh and spellbinding light on the story of the unknowable Marian Graves.
Sorrow And Bliss
Meg Mason
Everyone tells Martha Friel she is clever and beautiful, a brilliant writer who has been loved every day of her adult life by one man, her husband Patrick…until he leaves. Forced to return to her childhood home to live with her dysfunctional, bohemian parents (but without the help of her devoted, foul-mouthed sister Ingrid), Martha has one last chance to find out whether a life is ever too broken to fix – or whether, maybe, by starting over, she will get to write a better ending for herself.
The Island Of Missing Trees
Elif Shafak
It is 1974 on the island of Cyprus. Two teenagers, from opposite sides of a divided land, meet at a tavern in the city they both call home. In the centre of the tavern, growing through a cavity in the roof, is a fig tree. This tree will witness their hushed, happy meetings, their silent, surreptitious departures; and the tree will be there when the war breaks out, when the capital is reduced to rubble, when the teenagers vanish and break apart. Decades later in north London, sixteen-year-old Ada Kazantzakis has never visited the island where her parents were born. Desperate for answers, she seeks to untangle years of secrets, separation and silence.
The Bread The Devil Knead
Lisa Allen-Agostini
Alethea Lopez is about to turn 40. Fashionable, feisty and fiercely independent, she manages a boutique in Port of Spain, but behind closed doors she’s covering up bruises from her abusive partner and seeking solace in an affair with her boss. When she witnesses a woman murdered by a jealous lover, the reality of her own future comes a little too close to home.
The Sentence
Louise Erdrich
A small independent bookstore in Minneapolis is haunted from November 2019 to November 2020 by the store’s most annoying customer. Flora dies on All Souls’ Day, but she simply won’t leave the store. Tookie, who has landed a job selling books after years of incarceration that she survived by reading ‘with murderous attention,’ must solve the mystery of this haunting while at the same time trying to understand all that occurs in Minneapolis during a year of grief, astonishment, isolation and furious reckoning.
