Jun 10, 2011 ARCHIVES | Entertainment | COLUMNS NA
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Reviewed by Yvonne Zipp
Britain's Orange Prize was established 16 years ago to promote women's fiction in English. The judges look around the world for "excellence, originality, and accessibility" (and no, the first criterion isn't automatically canceled out by the third). Three of this year's shortlisted novels deal with imprisoned women, three with the aftermath of war, and three nominees are first-time novelists. The winner receives about $50,000 and a bronze statue nicknamed "Bessie."
1. "Annabel," by Kathleen Winter (Black Cat; paperback, $14.95). The number of great novels about hermaphrodites just doubled. Nine years after Jeffrey Eugenides' Pulitzer-winning "Middlesex," Canadian author Winter has created a frozen fable about a girl trapped inside a boy's body. Wayne was born a hermaphrodite in remote Labrador in 1968. The father decided the baby would be raised a boy and that no one (including Wayne) would know that the little one is mixed-gender. Wayne grows up in a macho hunting culture while dreaming of synchronized swimming, and his mother and a neighbor secretly try to nurture his "shadow self."
2. "Grace Williams Says It Loud," by Emma Henderson (not currently available in the United States). Grace is also trapped by her body, with birth defects exacerbated by polio. Unable to say more than two words at a time, she is deemed "ineducable" and sent to the Briar Mental Institute. Her first day, she meets Daniel, an armless boy with epilepsy and the zest for life of an Auntie Mame. Daniel teaches himself to ride a bike and type with his toes. Despite episodes of horrific abuse, Grace narrates with an upbeat, chatty tone, setting up a disconnect between what others believe about her and how she views herself. First-time British novelist Henderson has said in interviews that she wanted to give a voice to her older sister, who spent 35 years in an institution. The book has its flaws, but what a voice it is -- raucous, courageous and unwilling to be shut up.
3. "Great House," by Nicole Krauss (Norton, $24.95). This sober novel "seems to offer everything we loved about Krauss' previous novel: the pursuit of a lost object fraught with meaning, multiple narrators contributing pieces of a convoluted tale, and fractured visions from across a century punctuated by the Holocaust," The Washington Post's fiction editor, Ron Charles, wrote in his review in October. The characters are all linked by a hulking desk with 19 drawers, including a locked one. But this new book by the American writer "never dazzles us, never sweeps us away. Its beauty is a heavy brocade of grief that won't let these characters soar."
4. "The Memory of Love," by Aminatta Forna (Atlantic Monthly, $24.95). Last month, Forna's elegant novel, set in the aftermath of Sierra Leone's civil war, won the Commonwealth Prize (beating out fellow Orange nominee "Room," among others). Adrian Lockheart is a British psychologist volunteering in Freetown, the capital. Every day at the hospital, he listens to a dying man talk about the woman he loved. As the story unfolds, Lockheart begins to wonder how much of it is true. I love a good unreliable narrator, but Forna, born in Scotland to a Sierra Leonian father and a Scottish mother, offers even more. She interweaves the stories of a gifted young surgeon who befriends Lockheart, a talented singer and people who have suffered betrayals so great their minds cannot absorb the loss.
5. "Room," by Emma Donoghue (Back Bay; paperback, $14.99). "Everything about Donoghue's 'Room' sounds mawkish and sadistic," Charles wrote in his September review. Five-year-old Jack has lived his whole life locked in a sound-proof garden shed with his mom, who was kidnapped by her rapist years ago. Despite these nightmarish circumstances, his mother has created the safest, most loving environment she can for her little boy. "Donoghue, who was born in Ireland and now lives in Canada, has written one of the most affecting and subtly profound novels of the year."
6. "The Tiger's Wife," by Tea Obreht (Random House, $25). "Obreht's swirling first novel draws us beneath the clotted tragedies in the Balkans to deliver the kind of truth that histories can't touch," Charles wrote in February. A doctor named Natalia is on a good-will mission to vaccinate orphans in an unnamed Balkan country, when she learns that her grandfather has died on his way to join her. But the real heart of this novel, written by a 25-year-old Serbian-born woman who lives in New York, is the tales Natalia's grandfather told about growing up in a mountain village full of healers and peddlers, where an abused wife befriends an escaped tiger and a "deathless man" wanders for years.
Yvonne Zipp frequently reviews books for The Washington Post and the Christian Science Monitor.
Copyright 2011 Washington Post Writers Group
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