Nominees for this year’s Orange Prize – which goes to the best work of fiction by a woman writer – have been announced. “Carol Shields, who won the prize in 1998 with Larry’s Party, is chosen for Unless. The other frontrunners are Zadie Smith’s The Autograph Man, an examination of our modern obsession with celebrity and individualism which received mixed reviews; an Donna Tartt’s The Little Friend, about the aftermath of a murder in the deep south as seen through a child’s eyes. Also chosen are Alice Sebold’s US bestseller The Lovely Bones, narrated from heaven by a murdered girl; Siri Hustvedt’s complex saga of art and love, What I Loved; and Shena Mackay’s unshowy study of ageing Bohemians, Heligoland.”