That we tend to regard the shift from the short story to the novel as a natural authorial progression perhaps speaks to a failure to recognise the shorter form as its own distinct discipline. Short stories are not novels in miniature, or parts of novels pruned to stand on their own. Without the luxury of space and looser pacing, they demand of the writer a linguistic precision and compression that, at its most radical, borders on the poetic, and which across the breadth of a novel would feel wearying. Novels need room to breathe. The writer expanding their scope therefore faces a difficult adjustment: guarding against density while ensuring they don’t get lost in the space.
Dance Move by Wendy Erskine review – a propulsive second collection
This article is more than 4 years old
Set in Belfast, these pleasurable stories of magical thinking and unlived lives go straight to the emotional core
Leo Robson
Thu 24 Feb 2022
The stories of the Northern Irish writer Wendy Erskine, though colloquial and streetwise, are largely traditional in approach. She doesn’t mess the reader around. There are no games or tics, unless you count a taste for the adjective “sleek”. The titles in Dance Move, her propulsive and pleasurable second collection, tend to identify a character or characters (Mrs Dallesandro, Gloria and Max) or an emotional atmosphere (Memento Mori), dabbling at their most extreme in the meta-fictional (Bildungsroman) or double-edged – Nostalgie refers both to a song and the emotions it stirs, Cell to a faction and the virtual imprisonment entailed by membership. Even when Erskine begins with an unexplained allusion (“the night before”) or glimmer of intrigue (a man saying something not “entirely true”), the facts straighten themselves out soon enough, and just as often a situation is set down with unselfconscious baldness: “He was there as visiting professor of film”, “For the last nine years Linda and Rae had been having a takeaway together on a Friday night”.
Sweet Home by Wendy Erskine review – a gripping short-story debut
This article is more than 6 years old
Dark memories haunt these acutely observed portraits of love, loneliness and everyday ennui in Belfast
Lara Pawson
Thursday 27 June 2019
They hook you in hard, the people whose lives fill Wendy Erskine’s debut collection, but you wouldn’t want to trade places with any of them. To borrow from the balding man in a grey jacket, who makes a brief appearance commenting on the music of a fictional Belfast rocker in the penultimate story, each of these acutely observed portraits “penetrates to the heart of what it means to be lonely, or in love or to feel a failure”. An exceptional ear for dialogue, an impeccable semantic rhythm and an uncanny ability to tease laughter out of the darkest moments mean Erskine is perfectly poised to stare, unflinching, into our neoliberal abyss. The result is a gripping, wonderfully understated book that oozes humanity, emotion and humour.
Reflecting on his childhood in the autobiographical novel In the Castle of My Skin, George Lamming wrote that it was “my mother who really fathered me”. Damningly, the Barbadian novelist asserted that his father “had only fathered the idea of me”. That notion of children being left mainly, if not solely, the liability of mothers still widely resonates in Caribbean households. In Kit de Waal’s tender novel, The Best of Everything, the protagonist Paulette, a single mother, embraces the role not just of mothering and largely fathering her son, but also selflessly acting as a proxy mother to a child who risks being abandoned.
Audition by Katie Kitamura review – an evasive experiment
This article is more than 10 months old
This tricksy novel from the author of A Separation takes its cue from Rachel Cusk’s Outline trilogy – but what starts as intrigue soon starts to feel like time-wasting
Katie Kitamura’s most recent books, A Separation (2017) and Intimacies (2021) – each narrated by an unnamed woman upping sticks for Europe in the wake of emotional upheaval – were among several American novels to take inspiration from the coolly analytical style of Rachel Cusk’s Outlinetrilogy. Kitamura’s new novel, Audition, centred on marital strife between an actor and an art critic in New York, likewise deploys that Outline-patented register of philosophical meditation, this time to unsettling and even unfathomable purpose – which is another way of saying I just didn’t get it.
The millennium is back – not just in fast fashion or TikTok remixes, but in the mood of American fiction. Think peak Chabon and Eugenides; the intellectual gymnastics of Helen DeWitt; the last profane and puckish gasp of Tom Robbins. That brief window – before 9/11, smartphones and the chokehold of autofiction – when the novel felt as playful as it did expansive: bold and baggy as wide-legged jeans. Joyce Carol Oates channelling Marilyn Monroe. Jonathan Franzen snubbing Oprah. You can feel that early-00s energy jostling through a new crop of American novels: Lucas Schaefer’s The Slip, Kaveh Akbar’s Martyr! and Maggie Shipstead’s Great Circle are top-shelf examples. They’re big in all kinds of wonderful, infuriating ways: antic, overstuffed and richly peopled.
Susan Choi and Katie Kitamura among authors longlisted for Women’s prize for fiction
Sixteen novels are in contention for the £30,000 award, now in its 31st year, with settings ranging from climate-ravaged islands to a near-future Kolkata
Emma Loffhagen
Wed 4 Mar 2026
Katie Kitamura, Susan Choi, Kit de Waal and Lily King are among the authors longlisted for this year’s Women’s prize for fiction.
Awarded annually and now in its 31st year, the prize comes with £30,000, and is one of the most prominent accolades for women’s writing in the English language. The 16-strong list features a selection of novels that range in setting from climate-ravaged islands to a near-future Kolkata, and from 1970s Birmingham to East Berlin on the brink of reunification.
Choi was longlisted for her Booker-shortlisted novel Flashlight, a sweeping historical family saga propelled by a father’s disappearance, its trauma rippling across generations and geographies. Ranging from North Korea to Indiana, the US writer’s sixth novel is “geopolitically bold” and full of “confident chaos”, writes Beejay Silcox in her Guardian review.
US writer Kitamura’s fifth novel Audition, also shortlisted for the 2025 Booker prize, follows an unnamed actor who is confronted by a younger man who claims to be her son, and probes the role that acting and performance play in our lives.
De Waal’s The Best of Everything marks a second nomination for the author, who returns with the story of a working-class Caribbean woman in 1970s Birmingham, an “understated” and “beautifully rendered” tale, writes Colin Grant in his Guardian review.
King was longlisted for her sixth novel Heart the Lover, following a university campus love story into mid-life, which was praised by Rebecca Waitas “vivid, moving and witty”.
Virginia Evans was selected for The Correspondent, which tells the story of a woman in her 70s through her letters to friends, children, loved ones and strangers.
Chaired this year by the former Australian prime minister Julia Gillard, the judging panel has chosen a longlist she describes as “international in scope and setting”. The list features nine titles from independent publishers and seven debuts.
Many of the novels on the longlist grapple with the aftershocks of political upheaval. In Paradiso 17, Hannah Lillith Assadi follows a man living in exile, moving from Palestine to Kuwait then Italy and New York. The Others by Sheena Kalayil returns to the final days of the Berlin Wall, tracing how seismic historical change filters into the private lives of three friends. And in A Beast Slinks Towards Beijing, Alice Evelyn Yang draws on folklore and elements of magical realism to examine colonial brutality and trauma.
Environmental breakdown underpins other longlisted titles. Wild Dark Shore by Australian author Charlotte McConaghy takes place on an isolated island shaped by climate collapse, while Megha Majumdar’s A Guardian and a Thief imagines a near-future Kolkata hit by flooding and famine.
Several debut novelists turn their attention to mothers and children. The Benefactors, Wendy Erskine’s novel set in contemporary Belfast, follows allegations of a sexual assault, exploring tensions of class, status and anxiety about the future. Marcia Hutchinson’s The Mercy Step spans the first 11 years of a rebellious young girl’s life in 1960s Bradford, and in Dominion, Addie E Citchens examines the pressures placed on Black mothers.
Completing the longlist are Lucy Apps’s debut Gloria Don’t Speak, about a 19-year-old woman with a learning disability, Elaine Castillo’s Moderation, which features a content moderator who falls for her boss, and Kingfisher by Rozie Kelly, about an academic who also becomes fixated on his colleague.
Gillard is joined on this year’s judging panel by the poet and novelist Mona Arshi, the author and broadcaster Salma El-Wardany, the writer and comedian Cariad Lloyd and the DJ and author Annie Macmanus.
“These 16 books masterfully demonstrate the power of fiction to examine the messy business of being human,” Gillard said. “From climate change to artificial intelligence, they navigate the issues of our time with urgency and purpose, they immerse us in environments and experiences that are sometimes like our own, but more often are radically different, and they explore identities and perspectives that are often ignored or forgotten, amid those inherently universal and recognisable.”
A shortlist of six will be announced on 22 April, with the winner revealed on 11 June at a ceremony in London, along with the winner of the Women’s prize for nonfiction.
Last year’s Women’s prize winner was Yael van der Wouden for her debut novel The Safekeep, exploring repressed desire and historical amnesia in post-second world war Dutch society. Previous winners of the prize also include Barbara Kingsolver, Maggie O’Farrell, Kamila Shamsie and Zadie Smith.
To browse all books in the Women’s prize for fiction 2026 longlist, visit guardianbookshop.com. Delivery charges may apply.
