More 2025 Women’s Prize for Fiction reading – but have listened to audios (the wait-list on hard copies at the library was impossibly long for all of them).

The Persians by Sanam Mahloudji

The downside of this story about cashed-up Iranians in America was the seemingly over-the-top and extremely shallow characters. Could anyone be that blindly entitled?! But on the plus side, listening to the audio version meant different voices for the various perspectives – sweet relief!

What emerges (through the tiresome bits about shopping trips and skiing holidays) was a glimpse of the paths people took during the Iranian Revolution, and how inter-generational trauma reverberates. It made me think about the possibility of not seeing or judging inter-generational trauma in the same way when a person is cushioned by designer clothing, luxury holidays and a trust fund – do these trappings make it easier to bear or are they a gilded cage?

3/5

Nesting by Roisín O’Donnell

The thing about listening to Irish audios is the narrator… I’d basically listen to anything read in an Irish accent. It’s just so comforting. Although a ‘comforting’ story, this is not. Nesting tells of women in abusive relationships – and that abuse looks different for each woman. The political and social backdrop of the time added a layer – it’s 2018, when Ireland’s abortion laws were being debated and legal divorce was still relatively new (and a possibility for a younger generation of women). O’Donnell deftly weaves in the stigma and opinion attached to what the women at the centre of the story choose to do.

The story lost a little of its appeal toward the end, when a cat-and-mouse chase takes place – I could have done without the obviousness of this, given that O’Donnell had perserved with the slow, terrifying and relentless grind of coercive control.

3.5/5

Fundamentally by Nussaibah Younis

I really, really wanted to like this story about a British woman running a deradicalisation program for ISIS brides. I’d heard from other readers that it was really funny, but the humour didn’t land for me, and I couldn’t trust in the main character, Nadia’s, extremely fast-forming relationships – they simply didn’t ring true.

I have no doubt that the portrayal of United Nations politics (a not-what-you-know-but-who-you-know situation, if you want anything done) is accurate but Nadia’s approach to her work irritated me – she didn’t seem to take it seriously, and was preoccupied with individuals in a self-serving way, rather than the broader goal. Without spoilers, I did appreciate the way particular characters challenged Nadia’s ‘do-gooder’ approach, which left me wondering about how realistic it is to think you can change someone’s way of thinking.

2.5/5

What will win? I declared my winner when the longlist was first announced – All Fours by Miranda July is one of the most exciting and thought-provoking novels I’ve read in a long time. As it turns out, I’ve now read five of the six shortlisted books (I think Nesting should have been there!). I reckon the other possibility is The Safekeep by Yael Van Der Wouden, but I might be feeling particularly fond of that after hearing Yael speak so wonderfully at the Melbourne Writers Festival recently.