Women's Prize, Women's Prize Winners Eyes On The Prize Women's Prize, Women's Prize Winners Eyes On The Prize

The Glorious Heresies (2016)

The Glorious Heresies is a darkly humorous yet moving tale set in the criminal underworld of Cork, in post-crash Ireland. It shifts perspective between five central characters, most centrally Ryan Cusack, the eldest of six siblings who has lost his mother and despite high intelligence and a talent for music has fallen into a life of low-level drug dealing, only really gaining satisfaction from his relationship with Karine.

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Pod (2023)

Pod is a distinctive novel in that it takes as its focus the lives of a series of marine creatures, notably dolphins. Its primary focus is on Ea, a spinner / ‘Longi’ dolphin who becomes detached from her peaceful and ‘civilised’ pod and finds herself among a boorish, violent pod of bottlenose dolphins, known in the book as Tersiops. Along the way we meet an array of other creatures, all with their own characteristics, including a wise old whale, a gender-switching Wrasse, giant clams and a fugu or two. Memorably, there’s also the captive bottlenose dolphin Google, who has been enslaved by humans (or ‘Anthrops’ in the novel’s parlance) for horrifying military purposes.

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Nightcrawling (2022)

Nightcrawling tells the story of 17-year-old Kiara, a black girl living in poverty in Oakland, California.  Her situation is unenviable: her father dead, her mother imprisoned for a fairly horrifying reason, and taking responsibility for both her feckless aspiring-rapper brother and her virtually abandoned young neighbour Trevor. In desperation, she takes to the streets, where she is eventually picked up and abused by a gang of truly repulsive police officers and eventually finds herself at the centre of a court case against the police force. 

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