Orange Prize Shortlist for 2012 Announced

I’m a bit of a fan of the Orange Prize for Women as I always seem to find something that I love from the shortlist each year – books such as Emma Donoghue’s Room, Attica Locke’s Black Water Rising, Zadie Smith’s On Beauty, Marina Lewycka’s A Short History of Tractors in the Ukraine, and, of course, Lionel Shriver’s We Need to Talk About Kevin.  This year’s short list has just been announced, and I realised that other than Ann Patchett’s State of Wonder I didn’t know very much about the others.  I’m going to try Georgina Harding’s Painter of Silence next as it has got some good reviews online like this one from the Guardian Newspaper, but would love to hear reader’s feelings about the others.

Here’s the short list for 2012:

Half Blood Blues, Esi Edugyan
The Forgotten Waltz, Anne Enright
Painter of Silence, Georgina Harding
The Song of Achilles, Madeline Miller
Foreign Bodies, Cynthia Ozick
State of Wonder, Ann Patchett