Jack is a five-year-old who lives with his Ma in Room, 11ft by 11ft. He loves watching TV, and the cartoon characters he calls friends, but nothing is real to him beyond Room's locked door. Until the day Ma admits there's a world outside, and he's going to have to face it alone.
Born in 1969, Emma Donoghue is an Irish writer who lives in Canada. Her fiction includes the bestselling Slammerkin. Room, her seventh novel, was shortlisted for the 2010 Man Booker prize and was Hughes and Hughes Irish novel of the year.
Read the Observer's review
Read an interview with Emma Donoghue
Read an extract Photograph: Orange
Psychologist Adrian Lockheart leaves his life in England for in Sierra Leone's capital, just after the civil war. Struggling with the heat and dust, he finds unexpected friendship in a young surgeon at the hospital, the charismatic Kai, and begins to build a new life just as Kai makes plans to leave.
Aminatta Forna was born in Scotland and raised in west Africa. Her first book, The Devil That Danced on the Water, was shortlisted for the Samuel Johnson prize 2003. Ancestor Stones was winner of the 2008 Hurston/Wright Legacy award, the Liberaturpreis in Germany, and nominated for the International IMPAC Dublin literary award.
Read the Observer's review
Read the Guardian's review Photograph: Orange
Consigned to the Briar Mental Institute at the age of 11, Grace meets Daniel, an epileptic who can type with his feet. He sees someone very different from the little girl dismissed by a nurse as "disgusting": someone with whom he can share his secrets. Daniel in turn seems exotic to Grace, filling her head with tales from Paris and the world beyond.
Emma Henderson was born in 1958 and studied Modern Languages at Oxford and Yale. She taught English for more than a decade in London comprehensive schools and colleges, then worked in France for several years, running a ski and snowboard lodge. She returned to London in 2005 where she still lives, and in 2006 gained an MA in creative writing at Birkbeck.
Read the Guardian's review Photograph: Orange
During the winter of 1972, a woman spends a night with a Chilean poet before he leaves New York, abandoning his desk to her. Two years later, he's arrested by Pinochet’s secret police, never to be seen again. In London, a man caring for his dying wife discovers a lock of hair among her papers that leads to a terrible secret. In Jerusalem, an antiques dealer who has spent a lifetime reassembling his father’s study, plundered by the Nazis in 1944, has only one item left to find – a desk of many drawers.
Nicole Krauss is the author of two previous novels, Man Walks into a Room and The History of Love. She lives in Brooklyn.
Read the Guardian's review
Read the Observer's review Photograph: Orange
As a young doctor struggles to make sense of her grandfather’s death in a Balkan country still scarred by war, she is drawn to a tattered copy of The Jungle Book, and from there to the tale of the Deathless Man, and the extraordinary story of the Tiger’s Wife.
Téa Obreht is the youngest of the New Yorker’s top 20 writers under 40, and the only one who had yet to be published. She was born in 1985, in Belgrade, former Yugoslavia, and now lives in New York.
Read the Guardian's review Photograph: Orange
In the beautiful, spare environment of Labrador, in 1968, a baby is born who appears to be both a girl and a boy. He is Wayne, and raised as a boy in the hyper-male hunting culture of his father, but his shadow-self – a girl he thinks of as ‘Annabel’ – is never entirely extinguished, and indeed is secretly nurtured by the women in his life. As Wayne approaches adulthood, and its emotional and physical demands, the woman inside him begins to cry out.
Kathleen Winter has written for Sesame Street and CBC Television. Her first collection of short stories, boYs, was the winner of both the Winterset award and the Metcalf-Rooke award. A long-time resident of St John’s, Newfoundland, she now lives in Montreal. Photograph: Orange
