Three first novels feature on The Orange Broadband Prize for Fiction shortlist, announced this morning (April 15). Heather O'Neill's Lullabies for Little Criminals, Patricia Wood's Lottery and Sadie Jones' The Outcast all beat heavyweight competition from a longlist that included Anne Enright's Booker Prize winning The Gathering .

The only author to have been previously shortlisted is Rose Tremain, whose The Colour lost to Andrea Levy's Small Island in 2004. The veteran novelist Tremain, partner of the biographer Richard Holmes, is shortlisted this year for The Road Home, about an eastern European seeking work in England. The Times reviewer described it as "filled with emotional richness, complex sensibility and a passionate insistence on the humanity of the poor, the unattractive, the flawed and the dispossessed."

Although the prize is international, novels must be written in English and published in the UK. The 2008 shortlist features two Canadians - Nancy Huston, who writes in both French and English, is nominated for her 11th novel, Fault Lines, a pan-generational family story, and the journalist Heather O'Neill is selected for her debut, about a twelve-year-old growing up in Montreal's red-light district.

The Orange Prize, set up in 1996 in order to honour the best work of fiction written by a woman, is worth £30,000 to the winner - a sum that is anonymously endowed. Almost every year the prize attracts some controversy for its gender bias: last month the novelist A. S. Byatt criticised its "sexism", revealing that she forbids her publisher from submitting her work, and another novelist, Tim Lott, wrote in the Sunday Telegraph that the prize is "sexist and discriminatory, and it should be shunned - or, at the very least, mocked mercilessly".

The Orange Broadband Prize for Fiction 2008 shortlist

Fault Lines by Nancy Huston

The Outcast by Sadie Jones

When We Were Bad by Charlotte Mendelson

Lullabies for Little Criminals by Heather O’Neill

The Road Home by Rose Tremain

Lottery by Patricia Wood

..and the current betting odds:

Tremain- The Road Home 7/4

Mendelson- When We Were Bad 3/1

Jones- The Outcast 3/1

Huston- Fault Lines 5/1

Wood- Lottery 8/1

O' Neill- Lullabies For Little Criminals 8/1

(Source - Ladbrokes)

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