BOOKS: A gem on the Women’s Prize for Fiction shortlist

The Women’s Prize for Fiction is an annual award to a female author of any nationality for an original full-length novel written in English and published in the United Kingdom. This year’s winner will be announced on June 12 and can be watched live on their website.
The prize is a personal favourite of mine, and sitting down to read any of the nominations never ceases to send a tingle down my spine. Why? I guess I am an unapologetic feminist. Maybe that’s considered antiquarian these days but I love the idea that in 1991 when the shortlist for the Booker Prize included no women, despite the fact that 60 percent of all novels had been from women that year. A group of women and men set out to change that, and the Women’s Prize was born.
In 2023, a Women’s Prize for Non-Fiction was also launched. The organisation also offers ‘Discoveries’, by inviting unpublished and un-agented women writers to submit an opening of a novel in English up to 10,000 words. In relation to non-fiction, they offer ‘Horizons’, a free toolkit designed to inspire and support the next generation of non-fiction women writers.
This year, the shortlist comprises the following: ‘Soldier Sailor’, by Claire Kilroy; ‘Enter Ghost’, by Isabella Hammad; ‘The Wren, The Wren’, by Anne Enright; ‘Brotherless Night’, by VV Ganeshananthan; ‘Restless Dolly Maunder’, by Kate Grenville; and ‘River East, River West’, by Aube Rey Lescure.



‘Enter Ghost’, by British-Palestinian author Isabella Hammad, published by Vintage, is the fiction bookclub choice of the month at our bookshop, Tertulia. From the moment I started reading it, the hairs stood on the back of my neck. It’s hard to verbalise why that is; some books just do that. It’s as though from the very first sentence, the words have an authenticity or beauty that speaks to me.
The book, which is written in the first person, starts with the character Sonia arriving to an airport in Israel. She tells us: “I expected them to interrogate me at the airport and they did.”
Sonia is travelling from London, where she was born, and returning to Haifa to visit her sister, who lives there now, working in a University. Their father is from Haifa; an Arab Israeli and as a family they spent their summers there. She is now returning after an eleven-year absence.
In the 1948 Palestine War, the city of Haifa became part of the newly formed State of Israel. Many of the Arab population fled or were expelled. Hammad refers many times in the book to ‘the ’48’ or ‘the inside’ – that part of Palestine which is inside Israel. For me, this forms the theme throughout the story, as Sonia herself is inside but outside at the same time, in her identity, her family, her life.
On being introduced to someone, Sonia comments: “He was like me, blended and uncertain.” Having not fled Haifa in 1948, her family were in a sense blended and uncertain too. She listens to a tape of her grandmother being interviewed by her uncle. He asks the woman, “…and then if they say there is a Palestinian state, and they say you, Sitt Adia can live in it, if you want to. What will you say?”
She replies, “I do not want to live in it. So what. This is my house. Why should I leave it?”
“But your soul will awaken,” he replies. “Reawaken,” she responds.
Sonia is an actress, and she ends up performing in a production of Shakespeare’s ‘Hamlet’ in the West Bank, which is being directed by a friend of her sister’s in Haifa. We experience the beauty of the performance and her explanations of what acting does to her inside and outside. Set against the backdrop of the West Bank, it is a stunning story. And Hamlet’s “enter ghost” has it’s own story to tell too.
I’m very much looking forward to discussing Hammad’s book in the Tertulia bookclub, which takes place on two dates to accommodate everyone – May 23 at 7pm and May 26 at 5pm.
As for the rest of the books on the Women’s Prize for Fiction list, read them all this summer if you can.

Bríd Conroy and her husband, Neil Paul, run Tertulia bookshop at The Quay, Westport.