Six worth reading: the Orange prize nominees

The shortlist for the only annual award for fiction written by a woman is a mix of nationalities, one debut novelist and established writers.

Marilynne Robinson is the biggest name after an early exit for Nobel Prize winner Toni Morrison.

Morrison's latest novel A Mercy was on the 20-strong longlist but failed to make it through to the shortlist, announced at the London Book Fair today.

Her departure means Robinson — famous for leaving a 24-year gap between her debut Housekeeping and her Pulitzer Prize winner Gilead — is likely to become a firm favourite for the prize with third novel Home.

It is a companion piece to Gilead and focuses on the same family, the Boughtons.

But the prize could still produce an upset. Only one author, Deirdre Madden, has been previously shortlisted for the Orange.

Madden, who teaches at Trinity College, Dublin, was last considered for One By One In The Darkness in 1997. She is in contention for Molly Fox's Birthday, her seventh novel, about an actor and a playwright.

The debut novelist is Samantha Harvey, who was born in Kent and now lives in Bath. Her book, The Wilderness, covers the story of an architect's growing dementia.

Kamila Shamsie, who lives in St John's Wood but was born in Karachi to a literary Pakistani family, is shortlisted for her fifth novel, Burnt Shadows, which spans generations and continents.

She said the nomination was "pretty wonderful", particularly as prizes were so important for getting noticed. She added: "I suspect that, if at the start of my book, I had said I was going to write a book that took you from Nagasaki to Guantanamo Bay via partition and the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan, I would probably have stopped myself, thinking it would be a complete disaster.

"But by starting with a place I don't know that had this enormous historical moment, it freed up my imagination."

The other two contenders are both Americans — Ellen Feldman for Scottsboro, a story of race in the Deep South of America which William Hill installed as 2-1 favourite, and Samantha Hunt with The Invention Of Everything Else.

This was inspired by a visit to a small suburban museum after which she intended to research the inventor Alessandro Volta but found herself focusing on the little-known Nikola Tesla instead — who patented the wireless four years before Marconi.

Fi Glover, the broadcaster and chair of this year's judges, said: "We have stretched our heads getting to this shortlist. We were right down to the wire on several of the books and choosing just six was far harder than I had imagined, but we all left the judging room proud of the list we have chosen."

Janine Cook, from Waterstone's, said it was impossible to choose a winner from such a strong list. But she added: "Marilynne Robinson's Home must be a strong contender."

The winner, chosen on criteria of "excellence, originality and accessibility", will be announced in a ceremony at the Royal Festival Hall on 3 June.

The shortlist

1. Home by Marilynne Robinson, 62, American. Lives in Iowa. Third novel.
Jack, prodigal son of the Boughton family, returns home to make peace with his past including his father and his father's old friend, John Ames.

2. The Wilderness
by Samantha Harvey, 34, British. Lives in Bath. First novel. Architect Jake recalls fragments of his life and loves, including the fate of his imprisoned son, as Alzheimer's sets in.

3. Burnt Shadows by Kamila Shamsie, 35, Pakistani/British. Lives in London. Fifth novel. A continent-crossing story which spans half a century and ties a prisoner at Guantanamo Bay to a Japanese family hit by the atomic bomb in 1945.

4. Scottsboro by Ellen Feldman American. Lives in New York. Third novel. A young journalist with a conscience fights to save nine black youths from the electric chair in Thirties Alabama over a false cry of rape.

5. The Invention Of Everything Else, by Samantha Hunt, 37, American. Lives in New York. Second novel. The true story of Nikola Tesla, the Serbian-born inventor of radio, and Louisa, a young woman who meets him at the end of his life.

6. Molly Fox's Birthday by Deirdre Madden, 48, Irish. Lives in Dublin. Seventh novel. Actor Molly lends her home to a struggling playwright friend who reflects upon her life and why Molly never celebrates her own birthday.