The Walk Home

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A very long long list for the Baileys Women’s Prize for Fiction

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How many books is too many? I confess there’s more than a little self interest involved in the question.  The long list for the Baileys Women’s Prize for Fiction has just been announced and it’s a whopping 20 books long, albeit from 165 original applicants. The prize, which was previously known as the Orange, is for a full-length novel written in english by a woman of any nationality and published in the United Kingdom.

Of course a plus for having long lists longer than the customary 10 or 12 titles is that  many more authors are able to get their moment in the literary sunshine. This particularly applies to debut authors of which the long list has five including Emma Healey’s Elizabeth is Missing, which won the Costa Prize, and Laline Paull’s dystopian The Bees. It also gives the judges the opportunity to broaden the range of work celebrated beyond what might be viewed as more “conventional” subject and style.

On the downside,  I know I am not alone in liking to read as many of the contenders for

Rachel Seiffert’s The Walk Home deftly sums up the complexity of the pressures that can fracture families

Stevie, the protagonist in Rachel Seiffert’s new novel The Walk Home, is too young to be so self-possessed. Toowalk-home-seiffert_2870179a young to be on his own. Having run away to work in London while still in his teens he has returned to his native Glasgow, Scotland, and lives in the large empty house the team of Polish tradesmen is renovating. He is geographically close to his family; close enough to know he cannot go home. At the beginning, everything had been so different: so hopeful. Stevie’s parents, Graham and Lindsay, were young then too. But they were in love and, when Lindsay found she was pregnant, had set up home together in a neglected apartment on the rundown Glasgow housing scheme. Undeterred, they clean it up, give it a coat of paint, and it was their own place.
Lindsay sees it as the beginning of their journey out of the tenements: a future. But Graham increasingly feels the tug of the insular world in which he grew up, particularly membership of the Orange Lodge band, symbol of the pervasive sectarianism that divides Glasgow almost as rigidly as Belfast where its roots lay.
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