Bøger i Juniper Prize for Fiction serien

"A runaway circus lion haunts a small town where two lovers risk more than their respective marriages. A junket to Cuba and an ambassador's dalliance with a niece hide dark secrets and political revolution. "I've always had a knife," says the unstable stepson to his parents. Inventive, dark, and absurd, the stories in The Long Swim capture Terese Svoboda's clear-eyed, wry angle on the world: a place of violence and uncertainty but also wild beauty, adventure, and love both lasting and ephemeral. Her characters strive for escape-through romance, travel, or more self-destructive pursuits-and collide with the constraints of family and home, their longing for freedom and autonomy often at odds with the desire for safety and harmony. Cynical, irreverent, and formally daring, Svoboda's stories in The Long Swim are a deft exploration of womanhood and humanity. Waves of provocation and wonder toss the reader and leave them wanting more"--

"Set in a fictional town, at a fictional school, Linda N. Masi's debut novel, Fine Dreams, rewrites myth and history. Framed by a ghost's first-person narrative, the book centers on four young friends, the stars of their school's track team. While studying for exams, they are kidnapped and taken to a terrorist encampment. Two are claimed as "wives" by their captors, one is forced to wear a suicide vest, and each is subjected to appalling violence and terror. While their stories resonate with a widely publicized 2014 abduction, these four young women could have been taken in any of the many incidents that have plagued the Nigerian people for years. Even though they are abducted and abused by men in power and forced to survive in a dark place like Persephone, Masi's protagonists offer new endings for Persephone's story. In Masi's telling, these resilient young women recover their dreams and hopes to live in daylight once again. No matter where they travel or where they stay, they gain self-determination and reclaim their dreams"--

"Some called her the Everywhen Woman. She claimed to be 321 years of age. In 2038, after the big storm and the great flood and the bad times, Betty Baach wrote these words down and sometimes spoke them aloud, at her homeplace on Freon Hill. She referred to them as songs. All stories are songs, she'd always say. Set in West Virginia, The Songs of Betty Baach is a magical guide to resisting despair and a compendium of wisdom and rhythms by which to fortify oneself. The lives of the Baaches of Keystone and the Knoxes of Mosestown twist and connect in a tale of survival and retribution that crosses three centuries-moving from Betty's girlhood in colonial America to a future warped by environmental collapse and political unrest. Refusing the erasure of the lives of women, Indigenous peoples, and Black people who have always called this region home, this eloquent and distinctive novel is a necessary remedy for the continued distortion of a land and its inhabitants"--

"Word spreads from one recovering self-inflicted eye surgery patient to the next of a mystical book capable of overturning the Burlingtonian empire. Captivating and devious, the book of webs is constructed out of misremembered fragments, conflicting histories, and secrets whispered in the darkness. The insurgents tell of an enemy so powerful it owns the air, dictates reality, and has even managed to co-opt their thoughts. Their only hope is to conspire with the uprisings of their bodies: slips of the tongue, excretions, tics, bad hair days, and, most importantly, their dreams. In this darkly comic and inventive debut novel, Jesse Kohn introduces a network of shape-shifters and misfits. A militant priestess broods over orphaned angel eggs. A post-punk band animates a messianic homunculus made of belly button lint. A failed dream journalist goes on a terrible first date to heaven. Each misadventure is a chapter in a book devised to oppose the despotic order of their enemy-the book of webs"--

Exploring the vagaries of life, human connection, and desire, the twelve stories of Safe Places navigate the fault lines of existence. Shifting from New York and Chicago to the American West and the Australian outback, Kerry Dolan's characters move through an uncertain and unpredictable world.

Barb Matheson doesn't fit in: not on the Standing Rock Reservation; not at the mission in rural Ethiopia where she grew up; and certainly not at the Pennsylvania church where her husband preaches. Expansive and lyrical, Unfollowers is a tale of religious angst, unrequited love, and the upheaval of racial and economic privilege.

It's been decades since Mara's family was last together, decades since the day her sister Allison drowned at Silver Beach. This is a novel about the persistent, mystifying ties of family, the extravagant mess of addiction, and what it means to actually live inside your own life.

In prose both dreamlike and vivid, the characters in Pete Duval's second collection navigate paths through a landscape of vestigial faith and nagging doubt. As cosmic struggles play out against the backdrop of forgotten strip malls, suburban cul-de-sacs, and grimy cities, guidance comes from the unlikeliest of sources.

During the War of 1812 thousands of enslaved people rallied to the British side, turning against an American republic that had barred them from the promises of freedom and democracy. Set against the backdrop of rebellion and war, this book follows the interconnected stories of Towerhill and Sarai, two African slaves, and their master, Jacob Hallam.

Exploring the darker side of optimism, Sarah Harris Wallman's debut collection shows women attempting to build durable havens from reality, struggling to keep relationships intact, and reinventing themselves. As these twelve stories prove, there's no sensible way to fall in love, raise children, or escape. This is Senseless Women.

When Edward Tamlin disappears while writing his memoir, Jane Tamlin begins to write a secret, corrective "counter-memoir" of her own. Calling the book Choke Box, she reveals intimate, often irreverent, details about her family and marriage, rejecting her suspected role in her husband's disappearance.

"A woman walks a raccoon on a leash, a synchronized swimming coach pops pills during practice, a bagpiper holds a young girl hostage, and an orphan puts her fist through a window, discovering in the engine noise of a jet passing overhead the perfect witness to her inner pain. In this debut collection from prizewinning short story writer Malinda McCollum, people adrift in the American Midwest struggle to find their way in the world, with few signposts for guidance. Set largely in Des Moines, Iowa, over the expanse of several decades, these twelve stories explore the surprising places where our outsized longings may lead us. In prose as lean and unflinching as an Iowa winter, these stories offer confrontation and consolation in equal measure." --

Showing both the drama of familial intimacy and the ups and downs of the everyday, My Old Faithful introduces readers to a close-knit Chinese family. These ten interconnected short stories, which take place in China and the United States over a thirty-year period, merge to paint a nuanced portrait of family life, full of pain, surprises, and subtle acts of courage.