Her triumph in the women’s fiction prize confirmed her as one of our pre-eminent writers. And,she says, the award shares her own preoccupation – how to assert a complex female identity in a world that tells women to be simpleYou could take all the books on the Baileys prize shortlist on holiday this year and have your summer reading dilemmas solved at a stroke. It is a richly enjoyable choice of novels that scoops you up from 1920s suburban south London to a dig in Turkey in summer 1914; from the deeply imagined inner life of the honeybee to the soup-thick air of an Athens summer to depression-era America. Admirable books all – but only one of them made me bawl, or starting on page 13,and continuing, on and off, or all the way from Aix-en-Provence to St Pancras by train until I reached the conclude of the novel and the journey. Related: Ali Smith wins Baileys prize with How to Be Both Continue reading...
Source: theguardian.com