2006 Orange Prize for Fiction Longlist
Explore the 2006 Orange Prize for Fiction longlist, featuring standout novels by acclaimed women authors. Discover must-read books that made the prestigious literary award's selection.
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Gilead
by Marilynne Robinson
In 1956, toward the end of his life, Reverend John Ames begins a letter to his young son, sharing the story of his life and explaining how his faith influenced his choices and actions.
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Harbor
by Lorraine Adams
A New York Times and Washington Post Notable BookEntertainment Weekly's #1 Fiction Book of the YearA tremendously acclaimed and exquisitely realized novel of literary suspense, Harbor recounts the adventures of Aziz Arkoun who, at twenty-four, makes his way to America via the hold of an Algerian tanker and the icy waters of Boston harbor. Aziz soon finds himself a community of fellow Algerians, but their means of survival in this strange land begins to remind him of the dangerous world he was desperate to escape. As the story of Aziz and his friends unfolds, moving from East Boston and Brooklyn to Montreal and a North African army camp, Harbor takes us inside the ambiguities of these men's past and present lives. When Aziz discovers that he and his circle are most likely under surveillance, all assumptions, his and ours, dissolve in urgent, mesmerizing complexity.
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On Beauty
by Zadie Smith
Struggling with a stale marriage and the misguided passions of his three adult children, long-suffering art professor Howard Belsey finds his family life thrown into turmoil by his son's engagement to the socially prominent daughter of a right-wing icon. By the author of White Teeth. 200,000 first printing.
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Prep
by Curtis Sittenfeld
NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER • A modern classic of adolescent angst and ambition set in the world of prep school, from the author of Romantic Comedy and Eligible—“a tart and complex tale of social class, race, and gender politics” (The Boston Globe) One of The New York Times Book Review’s Ten Best Books of the Year Lee Fiora is an intelligent, observant fourteen-year-old when her father drops her off in front of her dorm at the prestigious Ault School in Massachusetts. She leaves her animated, affectionate family in South Bend, Indiana, at least in part because of the boarding school’s glossy brochure, in which boys in sweaters chat in front of old brick buildings, girls in kilts hold lacrosse sticks on pristinely mown athletic fields, and everyone sings hymns in chapel. As Lee soon learns, Ault is a cloistered world of jaded, attractive teenagers who spend summers on Nantucket and speak in their own clever shorthand. Both intimidated and fascinated by her classmates, Lee becomes a shrewd observer of—and, ultimately, a participant in—their rituals and mores. As a scholarship student, she constantly feels like an outsider and is both drawn to and repelled by other loners. By the time she’s a senior, Lee has created a hard-won place for herself at Ault. But when her behavior takes a self-destructive and highly public turn, her carefully crafted identity within the community is shattered. Ultimately, Lee’s experiences—complicated relationships with teachers; intense friendships with other girls; an all-consuming preoccupation with a classmate who is less than a boyfriend and more than a crush; conflicts with her parents, from whom Lee feels increasingly distant—coalesce into a singular portrait of the painful and thrilling adolescence universal to us all.
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The Accidental
by Ali Smith
Talking her way into the Norfolk cottage that the Smart family is renting for the summer, Amber, an enigmatic con artist, insinuates herself into the lives of Eve, her husband Michael, and their children.
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The Constant Princess
by Philippa Gregory
"Katherine of Aragon is born Catalina, the Spanish Infanta, to parents who are both kings and crusaders. At the age of three, she is betrothed to Prince Arthur, son and heir of Henry VII of England, and is raised to be Princess of Wales. She knows that it is her destiny to rule that far-off, wet, cold land." "Her faith is tested when her prospective father-in-law greets her arrival in her new country with a great insult; Arthur seems little better than a boy; the food is strange and the customs coarse. Slowly she adapts to the first Tudor court, and life as Arthur's wife grows ever more bearable. Unexpectedly in this arranged marriage, a tender and passionate love develops." "But when the studious young man dies, she is left to make her own future: how can she now be queen, and found a dynasty? Only by marrying Arthur's young brother, the sunny but spoilt Henry. His father and grandmother are against it; her powerful parents prove little use. Yet Katherine is her mother's daughter and her fighting spirit is indomitable. She will do anything to achieve her aim; even if it means telling the greatest lie, and holding to it."--BOOK JACKET.
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The History of Love
by Nicole Krauss
Leo Gursky taps his radiator each evening to let his upstairs neighbor know he's still alive. But it wasn't always like this: in the Polish village of his youth, he fell in love and wrote a book. . . . Sixty years later and half a world away, fourteen-year-old Alma, who was named after a character in that book, undertakes an adventure to find her namesake and save her family. With virtuosic skill and soaring imaginative power, Nicole Krauss gradually draws these stories together toward a climax of "extraordinary depth and beauty" (Newsday).
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The Night Watch
by Sarah Waters
The story of three women in post-World War II London, their love affairs and the mysterious young man who will have a powerful impact on their lives. From the author of "Fingersmith".
