Award
Women's Prize
The Women’s Prize is an annual literary award established in 1996 to recognize and amplify outstanding writing by women. Created in response to the historical underrepresentation of women in major literary awards, it originally honored fiction and expanded to include narrative non-fiction in 2024. The Prize celebrates works written in English and published in the United Kingdom, with winners receiving a £30,000 cash prize and a commissioned artwork.
2025
Fiction
The Safekeep
It is 1961 and the rural Dutch province of Overijssel is quiet. Bomb craters have been filled, buildings reconstructed, and the war is truly over. Living alone in her late mother’s country home, Isabel knows her life is as it should be—led by routine and discipline. But all is upended when her...
Non-Fiction
The Story of a Heart
One summer day, nine-year-old Keira Ball was in a terrible car accident and suffered catastrophic brain injuries. As the rest of her body began to shut down, her heart continued to beat. In an act of extraordinary generosity, Keira’s parents and siblings immediately agreed that she would have wanted...
2024
Fiction
Brotherless Night
Jaffna, 1981. Sixteen-year-old Sashi wants to become a doctor. But over the next decade, a vicious civil war tears through her home, and her dream spins off course as she sees her four beloved brothers and their friend K swept up in the mounting violence.
Desperate to act, Sashi accepts K’s...
Non-Fiction
Doppelganger
What if you woke up one morning and found you’d acquired another self—a double who was almost you and yet not you at all? What if that double shared many of your preoccupations but, in a twisted, upside-down way, furthered the very causes you’d devoted your life to fighting against?
Not long ago,...
2023
Fiction
Demon Copperhead
Set in the mountains of southern Appalachia, Demon Copperhead is the story of a boy born to a teenaged single mother in a single-wide trailer, with no assets beyond his dead father’s good looks and copper-colored hair, a caustic wit, and a fierce talent for survival. Relayed in his own unsparing...
2022
Fiction
The Book of Form and Emptiness
One year after the death of his beloved musician father, thirteen-year-old Benny Oh begins to hear voices. The voices belong to the things in his house—a sneaker, a broken Christmas ornament, a piece of wilted lettuce. Although Benny doesn't understand what these things are saying, he can sense...
2021
Fiction
Piranesi
Piranesi’s house is no ordinary building: its rooms are infinite, its corridors endless, its walls are lined with thousands upon thousands of statues, each one different from all the others. Within the labyrinth of halls an ocean is imprisoned; waves thunder up staircases, rooms are flooded in an...
2020
Fiction
Hamnet
England, 1580: The Black Death creeps across the land, an ever-present threat, infecting the healthy, the sick, the old and the young alike. The end of days is near, but life always goes on.
A young Latin tutor—penniless and bullied by a violent father—falls in love with an extraordinary, eccentric...
2019
Fiction
An American Marriage
Newlyweds Celestial and Roy are the embodiment of both the American Dream and the New South. He is a young executive, and she is an artist on the brink of an exciting career. But as they settle into the routine of their life together, they are ripped apart by circumstances neither could have...
2018
Fiction
Home Fire
Isma is free. After years of watching out for her younger siblings in the wake of their mother’s death, she’s accepted an invitation from a mentor in America that allows her to resume a dream long deferred. But she can’t stop worrying about Aneeka, her beautiful, headstrong sister back in London, or...
2017
Fiction
The Power
In *The Power*, the world is a recognizable place: there's a rich Nigerian boy who lounges around the family pool; a foster kid whose religious parents hide their true nature; an ambitious American politician; a tough London girl from a tricky family.
But then a vital new force takes root and...
2016
Fiction
The Glorious Heresies
When grandmother Maureen Phelan is surprised in her home by a stranger, she clubs the intruder with a Holy Stone. The consequences of this unplanned murder connect four misfits struggling against their meager circumstances.
Ryan is a fifteen-year-old drug dealer desperate not to turn out like his...
2015
Fiction
How to Be Both
How to Be Both is a novel that unfolds in two interwoven narratives, presented in different orders depending on the edition. One thread follows George, a contemporary teenager grieving the loss of her mother, as she navigates memory, art, and the lingering presence of absence in her daily life. Her...
2014
Fiction
A Girl Is a Half-Formed Thing
Told in a fragmented, stream-of-consciousness voice, the novel follows an unnamed girl from childhood into early adulthood as she grows up in a troubled Irish family. Her life is closely bound to that of her brother, whose serious illness shapes the emotional landscape of their home. From an early...
2013
Fiction
May We Be Forgiven
Harold Silver has spent a lifetime watching his younger brother, George, a taller, smarter, and more successful high-flying TV executive, acquire a covetable wife, two kids, and a beautiful home in the suburbs of New York City. But Harry, a historian and Nixon scholar, also knows George has a...
2012
Fiction
The Song of Achilles
Exiled from his home as a boy, Patroclus grows up in the court of King Peleus, where he forms an unexpected bond with the king’s son, Achilles—a gifted and celebrated warrior destined for greatness. As they train together and come of age, their friendship deepens into a profound and enduring love,...
2011
Fiction
The Tiger's Wife
In a Balkan country mending from war, Natalia, a young doctor, is compelled to unravel the mysterious circumstances surrounding her beloved grandfather’s recent death. Searching for clues, she turns to his worn copy of *The Jungle Book* and the stories he told her of his encounters over the years...
2010
Fiction
The Lacuna
Harrison William Shepherd grows up between Mexico and the United States, never fully belonging to either world. As a young man in Mexico, he becomes involved with prominent figures such as artists Diego Rivera and Frida Kahlo, and later finds himself working as a secretary to the exiled Russian...
2009
Fiction
Home
Glory Boughton, aged thirty-eight, has returned to Gilead to care for her dying father, Reverend Robert Boughton. Soon her brother, Jack—the prodigal son of the family, gone for twenty years—comes home too, looking for refuge, and trying to make peace with his turbulent past.
When he was a child he...
2008
Fiction
The Road Home
In the wake of factory closings and his beloved wife's death, Lev is on his way from Eastern Europe to London, seeking work to support his mother and his little daughter. After a spell of homelessness, he finds a job in the kitchen of a posh restaurant, and a room in the house of an appealing...
2007
Fiction
Half of a Yellow Sun
Set in Nigeria during the 1960s, Half of a Yellow Sun follows the lives of several characters whose paths converge in the years leading up to and during the Biafran War. Ugwu, a village boy, becomes a house servant to Odenigbo, a university professor whose home is a hub of political debate and...
2006
Fiction
On Beauty
On Beauty is the story of an interracial family living in the university town of Wellington, Massachusetts, whose misadventures in the culture wars—on both sides of the Atlantic—serve to skewer everything from family life to political correctness to the combustive collision between the personal and...
2005
Fiction
We Need to Talk About Kevin
Eva never really wanted to be a mother—and certainly not the mother of the unlovable boy who murdered seven of his fellow high school students, a cafeteria worker, and a much-adored teacher who tried to befriend him, all two days before his sixteenth birthday.
Now, two years later, it is time for...
2004
Fiction
Small Island
Set in the years during and after World War II, Small Island follows the intertwined lives of four characters whose journeys bring them together in postwar London. Hortense, a proud and determined Jamaican woman, arrives in England expecting opportunity and respect, only to encounter hardship and...
2003
Fiction
Property
Manon Gaudet, pretty, bitterly intelligent, and monstrously self-absorbed, seethes under the dominion of her boorish husband. In particular, his relationship with her slave Sarah, who is both his victim and his mistress.
Exploring the permutations of Manon’s own obsession with Sarah against the...
2002
Fiction
Bel Canto
At a lavish birthday party in a South American country, diplomats, business leaders, and dignitaries gather to hear a celebrated opera singer perform. The evening is abruptly interrupted when a group of insurgents storms the residence, taking the guests hostage in an effort to secure political...
2001
Fiction
The Idea of Perfection
Harley Savage is a plain woman, a part-time museum curator and quilting expert with three failed marriages and a heart condition. Douglas Cheeseman is a shy, gawky engineer with jug-handle ears, one marriage gone sour, and a crippling lack of physical courage.
They meet in the little Australian...
2000
Fiction
When I Lived in Modern Times
In the spring of 1946, Evelyn Sert stands on the deck of a ship bound for Palestine. For the twenty-year-old from London, it is a time of adventure and change when all things seem possible. Swept up in the spirited, chaotic churning of her new, strange country, she joins a kibbutz, then moves on to...
1999
Fiction
A Crime in the Neighborhood
In a quiet Washington, D.C. suburb in the 1970s, ten-year-old Marsha watches her familiar world begin to shift after the death of her mother. Already unsettled by grief, she becomes increasingly aware of the tensions and unspoken dynamics within her neighborhood. When a violent crime occurs nearby,...
1998
Fiction
Larry's Party
Larry Weller, born in 1950, is an ordinary guy made extraordinary by his creator's perception, irony, and tenderness. Larry's Party gives us, as it were, a CAT scan of his life, in episodes between 1977 and 1997, that seamlessly flash backward and forward.
We follow this young floral designer...
1997
Fiction
Fugitive Pieces
In 1940, a boy bursts from the mud of a war-torn Polish city, where he has buried himself to hide from the soldiers who murdered his family. His name is Jakob Beer. He is only seven years old. And although by all rights he should have shared the fate of the other Jews in his village, he has not only...
1996
Fiction
A Spell of Winter
Cathy and her brother, Rob, have forged a passionate refuge against the terror of loneliness and family secrets, but their sibling love becomes fraught with danger. As Catherine fights free of her dark present and haunting past, the spell of winter that has held her in its grasp begins to break.