Painter of Silence by Georgina Harding – review
Clare Clark acclaims an exquisite novel of wartime RomaniaIt is the early 1950s in Iasi, a small city in communist Romania. The city is bleak, monochrome as a photograph, "black smears of roads, grey walls, grey buildings angled across the sides of hil...
Thrillers roundup – reviews
On the Floor by Aifric Campbell, The Whore's Asylum by Katy Darby, The Expats by Chris Pavone and When Nights Were Cold by Susanna JonesOn the Floor by Aifric Campbell (Serpent's Tail, £12.99)Before she turned to novel-writing, Campbell spent 13 years...
Gallery: your guide to the Orange longlist
This year's Orange prize longlist takes in everything from 19th-century life on a Hebridean island to New York in the decade following 9/11Ranjit DhaliwalSarah CrownClaire ArmitsteadLisa AllardiceJustine Jordan
The Orange prize sets a comprehensive example to the Booker
By including much of this year's significant English fiction – which notably includes US writers – the Orange has a longlist any books prize could be proud ofThe 2012 Orange Prize longlist lands in the dust kicked up by the ongoing rumpus about the...
Historical novels dominate Orange longlist
Five debut novelists among 20 vying for prize for women writersHistorical fiction – from love among heroes in ancient Greece to bickering jazz musicians in Nazi-occupied Paris – forms a significant chunk of this year's Orange prize longlist, which ...
We all love a literary spat. But let’s not forget the books | Alex Clarke
If it's not Callil resigning from the Booker jury, it's Naipaul condemning women writers. All great fun, as long as we separate the debate from the readingIf you are a woman who writes books, or writes about them, or reads them with anything more than ...
Feminism in literature
In the second in our occasional series on the ways in which writers use literature to make political cases, we turn our attention to feminism.Women and literature have hit the headlines over the last week, both for positive reasons – Téa Obreht's v...
‘I don’t feel I’ve earned it’
The author of The Tiger's Wife is, at 25, the youngest person ever to win the prestigious literary award. So why does she have such mixed feelings about the honour?For the first seven years of her life, growing up in Belgrade, Téa Obreht was steeped ...
Does Téa Obreht’s Orange prize signal a return to fabulism?
The Tiger's Wife's use of folklore chimes with a number of other writers' recent work. Is there a trend in the making?Clearly, I wasn't the only one caught on the hop by Téa Obreht's Orange prize win. With odds of 2/1, Emma Donoghue's novel, Room, was...
Orange prize 2011 goes to Téa Obreht
Surprise victory for The Tiger's Wife makes Obreht the award's youngest ever winnerThe winner of this year's Orange prize for fiction is Téa Obreht, a first time novelist and, at 25, the youngest author to take the award in its 16-year history.Belgrad...
Téa Obreht is an exuberant Orange prize winner
The Tiger's Wife weaves together a set of picaresque wartime fables in a dazzling first novelRoom, a novel narrated by a five-year-old boy who has spent his whole life incarcerated with his abducted mother, looked like a very safe bet indeed for this y...
Bidisha’s thought for the day: Joanna Trollope