Nadifa Mohamed's Black Mamba Boy Harper Collins, 2009 "...and it's a story that I think hasn't been told before..." That's how Nadifa Mohamed describes her first novel, Black Mamba Boy in this video. Maybe that's a tall order for a novel in 2010. And, then again, maybe not. Consider this.
Kathryn Stockett's The Help Penguin, 2009 I don't listen to a lot of audiobooks; it's not that I have a philosophical stance against them, I'm just old-fashioned, so the first inclination is to pick up the book. But what I do quite enjoy is having both options, so that if
Monique Roffey's The White Woman on the Green Bicycle (Simon & Schuster, 2009) I was pleased to see that more than half of the Orange Prize shortlisted titles -- including this novel -- were still unread in my stacks. Reading the longlist was a crazy undertaking (see more talk of
Attica Locke's Black Water Rising Harper Collins, 2009 So if I was relieved to see how relatively short Laila Lalami's The Secret Son was, when I picked it up from the library, as part of my insane Read-the-Orange-Prize-Longlist plan, you can imagine how disheartened I was to see how relatively
I admit it: the first feeling that I had when I saw Laila Lalami's novel was relief, relief that it was obviously shorter than so many of the novels I wanted to read so quickly as part of the Orange Prize longlist reading I wanted to do. Not very propitious,
