Home run ... Rose Tremain. Photograph: David Levenson/Getty
So, in the end it was the Bookies' favourite what won it - Rose Tremain's The Road Home takes home the £30,000 Orange Broadband prize for fiction.
Tremain's 10th book follows the story of Lev, an immigrant from Eastern Europe as he makes his way through Britain. It beat three first time novelists to the prize - Sadie Jones with The Outcast; Heather O'Neill with Lullabies for Little Criminals; as well as a couple of more established names - Charlotte Mendelson with When We Were Bad; and Nancy Huston with Fault Lines.
Kirsty Lang, the chair of judges, said that although Tremain's book, "could have been a 'worthy' book, it wasn't." But was it a worthy winner?
