Baileys Women’s Prize for Fiction 2016

Why not settle down with your favourite tipple, whatever that may be and read your way through this year’s shortlist for the Baileys Women’s Prize for Fiction. There are some great titles on the list, including three debut novels. 

Now in its 21st year, the award celebrates excellence, originality and accessibility in writing by women throughout the world. 





Ephram Jennings has never forgotten the beautiful girl with the long braids running through the piney woods of Liberty, their small East Texas town. For Ruby Bell, Liberty was a place of devestating violence from which she fled to seedy, glamourous 1950s New York.

Years later, pulled back home, 30 year old Ruby is faced with the seething hatred of a town desperate to destroy her and Ephram must choose between loyalty to the sister who raised him and the chance for a life with the woman he has loved since he was a boy.



The children of Rosaleen Madigan return to the west coast of Ireland for a final family Christmas in the home their mother is about to sell. As the feast turns into a near painful comedy the adult children are left feeling that their childhoods are being erased, their personal history bought and sold.




One messy murder affects the lives of five misfits who exist on the fringes of Ireland's post-crash society. 

Maureen, the accidental murderer, has returned to Cork after 40 years in exile to discover that Jimmy, the son she was forced to give up years before, has grown into the most fearsome gangster in the city. In seeking atonement for the murder and a multitude of other perceived sins, she threatens to destroy everything her son has worked so hard for, but her actions risk bringing the intertwined lives of the Irish underworld into the spotlight.


Meet Veblen. She's an experienced cheerleader (mainly of her narcissistic, hypochondriac, controlling mother), an amateur translator, and a passionate defender of the anti-consumerist views of her namesake, the economist Thorstein Veblen. She's also a firm believer in the distinct possibility that the plucky grey squirrel following her around can understand everything she says.

 

 Annie McDee, alone after the disintegration of her long-term relationship and trapped in a dead-end job, is searching for a present for her unsuitable lover in a neglected second-hand shop. Within the jumble of junk and tack, a grimy painting catches her eye. Leaving the store with the picture after spending her meagre savings, she prepares an elaborate dinner for two, only to be stood up, the gift gathering dust on her mantelpiece. But every painting has a story - and if it could speak, what would it tell us? For Annie has stumbled across 'The Improbability of Love', a lost masterpiece by Antoine Watteau, one of the most influential French painters of the 18th century

When four graduates from a small Massachusetts college move to New York to make their way, they're broke, adrift, and buoyed only by their friendship and ambition. 

Over the decades, their relationships deepen and darken, tinged by addiction, success, and pride. Yet their greatest challenge, each comes to realise, is Jude who serves as the centre of their gravity. By midlife he is a terrifyingly talented litigator yet an increasingly broken man, his mind and body scarred by an unspeakable childhood, and haunted by what he fears is a degree of trauma that he'll not only be unable to overcome - but that will define his life forever.

The winner will be announced 8 June 2016.