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Orange Prize Goes to Rose Tremain

by Zoe Strimpel
Thu, 5 Jun 2008 at 4:52 PM

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Bookies' favorite Rose Tremain won the Orange Prize for fiction last night with "The Road Home" (to be published in America in August by Little, Brown), her novel about a Russian immigrant to Britain. Lev comes to London with no job, few friends, and limited English. Though the city promises great things — sex, money, opportunity — there's a whole lot of alienating oddness to come to grips with first. There's the cliquey pub culture, the snarling streets, and the lonely flats. A sense of belonging is the goal, but it's not an easy one to achieve.

The prize had its usual lashings of controversy this year: grumbles that there is no need for a women-only prize and that such a differentiation is self-defeating and promotes a sense of women as weaker in the literary world. Then there was the Lily Allen debacle, in which the singer was signed on to the panel of judges without any obvious credentials but crass celebrity and a bookish godmother, Susie Boyt. When she bowed out, it was seen as a relief and a return from aberration.

The other short-listed nominees were the Canadian Nancy Huston for "Fault Lines"; Sadie Jones for "The Outcast" (her father is the Jamaican-born screenwriter and producer Evan Jones); the American Heather O'Neill for "Lullabies for Little Criminals"; Patricia Wood (also American) for "Lottery," and Charlotte Mendelson for "When We Were Bad," about an Orthodox Jewish family turned on its head by a wedding scandal.

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