Women's Prize for Fiction - The Longlist

The Women's Prize for Fiction (formerly the Orange Prize For Fiction) is probably my favourite literary award out there.  It's not stuffy and pretentious like the Man Booker Prize (oh my GOD how I hate that one) and it's a bit more serious than the Costa Book Award (can't take an award named after a coffee chain seriously, no matter how nice their coffee is).  The Women's Prize for Fiction is like the Goldilocks of book prizes--not too boring and stuck up it's own butt but not full of fluff.

And since it's International Women's Month (Really?! You don't say!) I thought I'd just throw the longlist up on here and just say how excited I am about it:

Kitty Aldridge - A Trick I Learned From Dead Men (Jonathan Cape)
Kate Atkinson - Life After Life (Doubleday)
Ros Barber - The Marlowe Papers (Sceptre)
Shani Boianjiu - The People of Forever are Not Afraid (Hogarth)
Gillian Flynn - Gone Girl (Weidenfeld & Nicolson)
Sheila Heti - How Should A Person Be? (Harvill Secker)
A M Homes - May We Be Forgiven (Granta)
Barbara Kingsolver - Flight Behaviour (Faber)
Deborah Copaken Kogan - The Red Book (Virago)
Hilary Mantel - Bring Up the Bodies (Fourth Estate)
Bonnie Nadzam - Lamb (Hutchinson)
Emily Perkins - The Forrests (Bloomsbury Circus)
Michèle Roberts - Ignorance (Bloomsbury)
Francesca Segal - The Innocents (Chatto & Windus)
Maria Semple - Where’d You Go, Bernadette (Weidenfeld & Nicolson)
Elif Shafak - Honour (Viking)
Zadie Smith - NW (Hamish Hamilton)
M L Stedman - The Light Between Oceans (Doubleday)
Carrie Tiffany - Mateship with Birds (Picador)
G. Willow Wilson - Alif the Unseen (Corvus Books)

I'll be the first to say I've only read one title off of this list but I'd recommend Gillian Flynn's Gone Girl to just about anyone.  Actually, I'm going to try and get my hands on more of Flynn's stuff soonish!  I pretty much groaned out loud when I saw Hilary Mantel's Bring Up the Bodies on yet another prize list... I mean, snore.  I'm sure Matel's work is enjoyable for some people but I'm not one of them.  And besides... she's won enough already this year... let someone else have a go!

I'm really excited about Shafak's Honour and Kingsolver's Flight Behaviour, so much so that I bought the Kindle versions this morning.  Also I'm seeing Kingsolver in April/May and I'm pretty stoked about that too.  I'm very curious about Boianjiu's The People of Forever are Not Afraid... It looks really interesting!

My goodness, my "to read" list is growing by leaps and bounds!  Are any of you guys excited by any of these books or are there some missing from the list that you think should be there?  Have you read any of them already?

X
S