Tag: Women’s Prize
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Historical fiction, intersectionality, and secrecy: Yael van der Wouden’s ‘The Safekeep’
There’s a moment, just one page, in Yael van der Wouden’s The Safekeep (Penguin, 2024)—winner of last year’s Women’s Prize for Fiction—that gathers its narrative threads and holds them together. The queer, the racial, the Jewish threads. Thin threads and thick, stronger and weaker threads. One page where they intersect and where the reader can…
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The careful book in V.V. Ganeshananthan’s ‘Brotherless Night’
V.V. Ganeshananthan’s Brotherless Night (Penguin, 2023) won the 2024 Women’s Prize for Fiction, highlighting its powerful storytelling. Set during Sri Lanka’s civil war, the novel follows Sashi, a Tamil medical student, as she navigates care, ethics, and history in a time of violence. A masterpiece of careful, compassionate writing.
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The anti-Bildungsroman: Barbara Kingsolver’s ‘Demon Copperhead’
In this post I explore the transformative journey of Barbara Kingsolver’s ‘Demon Copperhead’, a contemporary retelling of Charles Dickens’s classic Bildungsroman ‘David Copperfield’, set in Appalachia amid opioid addiction. I examine the complexities of growth and stagnation, as Demon’s narrative navigates between traditional Bildungsroman elements and an intriguing anti-Bildung twist, shaping a poignant coming-of-age tale.