Arundhati Roy’s memoir on Women’s Prize longlist

A thorny mother and daughter relationship, China’s one-child policy, Afghanistan’s fractured history, a study of trees as ‘agents of change’ and a warning on fascism are among the 16 books in the Women’s Prize for Non-Fiction longlist, announced last week.

The books speak to fraught times — and also hold out hope — covering diverse themes including politics, science, history, art, nature and more. On it is Arundhati Roy’s memoir, Mother Mary Comes to Me (Hamish Hamilton), about her complex ties with her mother, Mary Roy, and how she was both her “shelter and her storm”.

American journalist Barbara Demick’s Daughters of the Bamboo Grove (Granta) tells the story of twins separated at birth during China’s one-child policy and their different life trajectories, one growing up in China and the other in the U.S. She puts international adoption under scrutiny as also the quality of life in the East and West.

Ece Temelkuran had to leave her country — Turkey — “to escape fascism, to be able to write, think and simply be.” In the summer of 2022, after six years of homelessness, she began to take stock of all that she had lost because she had to leave home. In Nation of Strangers: Rebuilding Home in the 21st Century (Canongate), Temelkuran writes that “there is a sense of mourning in the air… mourning not for what we have already lost, but for what we know we eventually will.” All of us, she says, are searching for a new home,” for when basic human values don’t match up to the blunt cruelty of the new world order, “we become morally homeless.”

Kamila Shamsie found Lyce Doucet’s The Finest Hotel in Kabul (Hutchinson Heinemann) “ingenious”. In it, Doucet, who has reported from Afghanistan, draws attention to the past and present of the country and tells it through the journey of the luxurious Hotel Inter-Continental in Kabul, which opened its doors in 1969. Doucet focuses on the people who have kept it running, like Hazrat, the septuagenarian housekeeper, or Abida, who became the first female chef after the fall of the Taliban in 2001.

Hope for the future

“The books are rigorous and researched, lyrical and flowing. They are drawn together by the originality and skill with which they have been written. This reading list carries relevance and truth for the future as well as holding significant value for the present day — the books spark curiosity and demand attention; they are for everyone navigating the complicated and unpredictable world we are living in. The voices of these sixteen remarkable women need to be heard — loud and clear,” said Thangam Debbonaire, Chair of Judges.

Harriet Rix’s The Genius of Trees (Penguin), for instance, holds out hope for the future in the time of climate change. Trees, she says, sculpt environments and “manipulate fundamental elements, plants, animals, bacteria, fungi, and even humankind to achieve their ends.”

Among the other contenders are Jenny Evans’ Don’t Let It Break You, Honey: A Memoir About Saving Yourself (Hachette U.K.); Daisy Fancourt’s Art Cure: The Science of How the Arts Transform Our Health (Penguin); Lady Hale’s With the Law on Our Side (Penguin); Kadiatu Kanneh-Mason’s To Be Young, Gifted and Black (Oneworld); Judith Mackrell’s Artists, Siblings, Visionaries: The Lives and Loves of Gwen and Augustus John (Picador); Deepa Paul’s Ask Me How It Works: Love in an Open Marriage (Viking); Sarah Perry’s Death of an Ordinary Man (Jonathan Cape); ; Jane Rogoyska’s Hotel Exile: Paris in the Shadow of War (Allen Lane); Zakia Sewell’s Finding Albion: Myth, Folklore and the Quest for a Hidden Britain (Hachette); Grace Spence’s To Exist as I am: A Doctor’s Notes on Recovery and Radical Acceptance (Profile Books); and Lea Ypi’s Indignity: A Life Reimagined (Penguin).

A shortlist of six will be announced on March 25, and the winner will be revealed on June 11, along with the winner of its sister prize, the 2026 Women’s Prize for Fiction. Last year, the Women’s Prize for Non-Fiction went to Rachel Clarke for The Story of a Heart.