Susanna Clarke’s second novel Piranesi is the frontrunner to win next week’s Women’s prize for fiction, according to bookmakers.
Coral has made Clarke’s Piranesi, the story of a man living in a House imprisoning an ocean, 5/2 favourite to take the £30,000 award. Published 16 years after Clarke’s blockbuster debut Jonathan Strange & Mr Norrell, Piranesi was shortlisted for the Costa best novel award last year. The Guardian called the novel “a remarkable feat, not just of craft but of reinvention”, praising it as “elegant and singular”.
Brit Bennett is second most likely to win the Women’s prize, according to Coral, which gave The Vanishing Half odds of 7/2. The story of identical twins, one of whom “passes” for white, it is the bestselling novel on the shortlist, racking up sales of 105,000 copies since it made the final six in April.
Waterstones’ Bea Carvalho said Bennett’s novel was the book chain’s bestseller to date on an “exceptionally strong” shortlist. “The Women’s prize shortlist has given it a welcome additional boost, and it has been gratifying to see high demand across all six titles and significant uplift on the sales of last year’s selection as a whole,” said Carvalho. “The judges certainly have a tough task in choosing a winner, we can’t wait to see what they choose.”
Yaa Gyasi’s Transcendent Kingdom, which follows a family of Ghanaian immigrants living in the American south, has been given odds of 4/1 to take the award, followed by Claire Fuller’s Unsettled Ground at 5/1. Fuller’s fourth novel is the story of middle-aged twins who have grown up in isolation in rural Wiltshire, after their mother dies.
Both Cherie Jones’s How the One-Armed Sister Sweeps Her House, a tale of murder and abuse in Barbados, and Patricia Lockwood’s Booker-longlisted No One Is Talking About This, in which real life collides with an online existence, were given odds of 6/1 by Coral.
The Women’s prize winner will be announced on 8 September. Former winners include Maggie O’Farrell, Helen Dunmore and Andrea Levy.
