Orange Broadband Prize for Fiction

Half of a Yellow Sun by Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie

Half of a Yellow Sun is set in Nigeria during the 1960s, at the time of the vicious Nigeria- Biafra war in which more than a million people died and thousands were massacred in cold blood.

Three characters are swept up in the rapidly unfolding political events. Ugwu, a boy from a poor village, is employed as a houseboy for a university lecturer.

Olanna, a young, middle-class woman, has come to live with the professor, abandoning her privileged life in Lagos for a dusty university town and the charismatic idealism of her new lover.

Richard is a tall, shy Englishman, who falls in love with Olanna's twin sister Kainene, who refuses to belong to anyone.

They are propelled into events that will pull them apart and bring them together in the most unexpected ways. As Nigerian troops advance and they run for their lives. Their ideals – and their loyalties to each other – are severely tested.

This novel is about Africa, about moral responsibility, the end of colonialism, ethnic allegiances, class and race, and about how love can complicate all these things.

Arlington Park by Rachel Cusk

Arlington Park, a modern-day English suburb, is a place devoted to the profitable ordinariness of life.

Amidst leafy avenues and comfortable houses, its residents live out the dubious accomplishments of civilisation: material prosperity, personal freedom, and moral indifference.

For all that, Arlington Park is strikingly conventional. Men work, women look after children, and people generally do what's expected of them.

There's a world awash with contentment but empty of belief, and riven with strange anxieties.

Set over the course of a single rainy day, the novel moves from, one household to another, and through the passing hours conducts a deep examination of its characters lives: of Juliet, enraged at the victory of men over women in family life; of Amanda, warding off thoughts of death with obsessive housework; of Solly, who confronts her own buried femininity in the person of her Italian lodger; of Maisie, despairing at the inevitability with which beauty is destroyed; and of Christine, whose troubled, hilarious spirit presides over Arlington Park.

The Inheritance of Loss by Kiran Desai

In the north-eastern Himalayas, at the foot of Mount Kanchenjunga, in a crumbling isolated house, there lives a cantankerous old judge, who wants nothing more than to retire in peace. But with the arrival of his orphaned granddaughter, Sai, and the son of his chatty cook trying to make his way in the US and stay a step ahead of the immigration services, this is far from easy.

When a Nepalese insurgency threatens the blossoming romance between Sai and her handsome tutor, they, too, are forced to consider their colliding interests. And the judge must revisit his past, his own journey and his role in this grasping world of conflicting desires – every moment holding out the possibility of hope or betrayal.

A Concise Chinese-English Dictionary for Lovers by Xiaolu Guo

Xiaolu Guo's first novel in (deliberately bad) English is a romantic comedy about two lovers who don't speak each other's language. The heroine is a Chinese girl who has been sent to London to study by her parents.

She calls herself Z because English people can't pronounce her name, but when she arrives at Heathrow she's no better at their language. Set loose to find her way though a confusion of youth hostels, Full English Breakfasts and a lack of the famous London fog, she winds up lodging with a Chinese family in Tottenham, and thinking she might as well not have left home. But then she meets a man who changes everything.

From the moment he smiles at her, she enters a new world of sex, freedom and self-discovery. But she also realises that, in the West, 'Love' does not always mean the same as in China, and you can learn all the words in the English language and still not understand your man.

The Observations by Jane Harris

Scotland 1863. In an attempt to escape her not-so-innocent past in Glasgow, Bessy Buckley takes a job as a maid in a big house outside Edinburgh, working for the beautiful Arabella.

Bessy is intrigued by her new employer, but puzzled by her increasingly strange requests and her insistence that Bessy keep a journal of her most intimate thoughts.

And it seems that Arabella has secrets of her own – including her near-obsessive affection for Nora, a former maid who died in mysterious circumstances.

Then a childish prank has drastic consequences, which throw into jeopardy all that Bessy has come to hold dear. Caught up in a tangle of madness, ghosts, sex and lies, she remains devoted to Arabella.

But who is really responsible for what happened to her predecessor Nora? As her past threatens to catch up with her and complicate matters even further, Bessy begins to realise that she has not quite landed on her feet …

Digging to America by Anne Tyler

Friday, August 15th, 1997. The night the girls arrived. Two tiny Korean babies are delivered to Baltimore to two families who have no more in common than this.

First there are the Donaldsons, decent Brad and homespun, tenacious Bitsy (who believes fervently that life can always be improved), two full sets of grandparents and a host of big-boned, confident relatives, taking delivery with characteristic razzmatazz.

Then there are the Yazdans, pretty, nervous Ziba (her family 'only one generation removed from the bazaar') and carefully assimilated Sami, with his elegant, elusive, Iranian-born widowed mother Maryam, the grandmother-to-be, receiving their little bundle with wondering discretion.

Every year, on the anniversary of 'Arrival Day' their two extended families celebrate together with more and more elaborately competitive parties, as tiny, delicate Susan, wholesome, stocky Jin-ho and, later, her new little sister Xiu-Mei, take roots, become American …

While Maryam, the optimistic pessimist, confident that if things go wrong – as well they may – she will manage as she has before, contrarily preserves her 'outsider' status, as if to prove that, despite her passport, she is only a guest in this bewildering country.