Orange or lemon?
This year's Orange Prize goes to Barbara Kingsolver for her novel The Lacuna.
This year’s Orange Prize winner has been announced: Barbara Kingsolver, for her novel The Lacuna. Apparently it’s about the Mexican revolution and the communist witch-hunts in the US in the 50s. Also in the running was Hilary Mantel, for Wolf Hall.
Most of those of us in the FAIRLADY office who’d read The Poisonwood Bible grabbed The Lacuna as soon as we saw it in the pile of books that arrived here for review. We’d been waiting 10 years for her next novel. But each person who took it brought it back. We just couldn’t get into it. (Not sure what this says about us – no rude comments, please!)
As Mark Brown reports in The Guardian, ‘It's a doorstopping novel that needs to be read properly rather than in snatches and tackles big subjects that resonate today.’
I did read Wolf Hall, however – also an ambitious novel – and that I did enjoy very much indeed. So it would have got my vote.
Kingsolver walks off with £30 000 in prize money. The Orange Prize for fiction is one of the UK’s most prestigious annual literary prizes, annually awarded to a female author of any nationality for the best original full-length novel written in English, and published in the UK in the preceding year.
The other four novelists in the running this year (besides Kingsolver and Mantel) are Rosie Alison (The Very Thought of You), Attica Locke (Black Water Rising), Lorrie Moore (A Gate at the Stairs) and Monique Roffey (The White Woman on the Green Bicycle). Irene Sabatini won the Orange Award for New Writers for The Boy Next Door.
Image: www.orangeprize.co.uk
Orange Prize for Fiction 2010 chair of judges Daisy Goodwin talks about Barbara Kingsolver's The Lacuna.
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Philippa
I requested 'The Lacuna' from my local library a few months ago and was delighted when they phoned me on Monday to collect it. I have been trying since then to get into the book but without any success. Just like the writer of this review I am a journalist and features writer and like to think of myself as somewhat of an academic, however, unlike Anna Rich I really don’t care what this says about me, and if the truth be told, I think it has a lot to do with the fact that we spend our days having to research and really think about what we write about, so when it comes to reading we really don't want to have to "fill in the spaces", as chair of the judges, Daisy Goodwin suggests in her appraisal of 'The Lacuna'. We really just want to be entertained! Perhaps fittingly my four-month-old Yorkie pup added her displeasure with the book too and chewed the spine, so whether I like it or not I am going to be buying ‘The Lacuna’ to replace a library book that I shouldn't have taken in the first place!