Orange prize for fiction 2010: the shortlist

British debut novelist Rosie Alison has already made it onto this year's longlist for the Romantic Novel of the Year award; and now The Very Thought of You, her story of an eight-year-old evacuee sent to a Yorkshire estate during the second world war, has been longlisted for the Orange prize. Published by small independent press Alma Books, the novel sees the child drawn into the unravelling relationship of the estate's owners, childless couple Thomas and Elizabeth Ashton
Read a review of The Very Thought of You
Photograph: Alma Books

US author Barbara Kingsolver is longlisted for The Lacuna, her first novel in nine years. Told through the diaries and letters of Harrison Shepherd, born in the US but raised in Mexico, the novel sees Shepherd meet the muralist Diego Rivera, his wife Frida Kahlo and their guest, Leon Trotsky, going on to become a bestselling author in the US before being investigated as a subversive
Read a review of The Lacuna
Photograph: Faber and Faber

Screenwriter-turned-novelist Attica Locke is longlisted for Black Water Rising, about a lawyer who saves a woman from drowning on the Houston bayou only to be ensnared in a murder investigation which forces him to confront his radical past. The book is published by small press Serpent's Tail, which also published Lionel Shriver's Orange prize-winning We Need to Talk About Kevin
Read a review of Black Water Rising
Photograph: Serpent's Tail

Hilary Mantel's Man Booker prize-winning Wolf Hall, set in the court of Henry VIII and tracing the rise of Thomas Cromwell, also makes the Orange longlist
Read a review of Wolf Hall
Photograph: Fourth Estate

American short story writer and novelist Lorrie Moore was chosen by the judges for her third novel, A Gate at the Stairs, which sees a college student take on the job of nanny to a wealthy couple looking to adopt, only to find herself drawn ever more deeply into the household's complicated life
Read a review of A Gate at the Stairs
Photograph: Faber and Faber

Spanish-born, British-educated Monique Roffey is longlisted for The White Woman on the Green Bicycle, her second novel and the story of a couple who arrive in Trinidad from England, where the wife, Sabine, becomes fixated on the leader of the country's new national party, Eric Williams
Photograph: Simon and Schuster