The 2009 Orange Broadband Prize for Fiction shortlist was announced in April. This year sees real variety in the themes covered by the shortlisted novels with mainly lesser known authors in the running.

Take a look at the shortlist for this year's prize and let us know what you thought of the novels nominated.

All synopsis extracts are taken from the Orange Broadband Prize website www.orangeprize.co.uk

Author and Title	Synopsis	Cover Art
Scottsboro by Ellen Feldman	Alabama 1931. A posse stops a freight train and arrests nine black youths. Their crime: fighting with white boys. The two white girls emerge from another freight car, and fast as anyone can say Jim Crow, the cry of rape goes up...
The Wilderness by Samantha Harvey	It’s Jake’s birthday. He is sitting in a small plane, being flown over the landscape that has been the backdrop to his life – his childhood, his marriage, his work, his passions. Now in his early sixties, he isn’t quite the man he used to be. He has lost his wife, his son is in prison and he is about to lose his past. Jake has Alzheimer’s.
The invention of everything else by Samantha Hunt	The Invention of Everything Else revolves around the twin poles of Serbian scientist Nikola Tesla, inventor of radio and creator of AC electricity, a notoriously marginalised genius and Louisa, a highly sensitive and imaginative young woman who encounters Tesla at the end of his life. It is also a novel about a father and a daughter, a love story, a New York story and a literary mystery, woven around a biographically accurate portrayal of the scientist, whose wild eccentricities have made him a counter-culture icon and whose carelessness about patenting his ideas led to Edison and Marconi stealing them and making fortunes, while Tesla died in poverty…
Molly Fox's Birthday by Deirdre Madden	Dublin. Midsummer. While absent in New York, the celebrated actor Molly Fox has loaned her house to a playwright friend who is struggling to write a new work. Over the course of this, the longest day of the year, the playwright reflects upon her own life, Molly’s and that of their mutual friend Andrew, who she has known ever since university. But why does Molly never celebrate her own birthday, which falls upon this day? What does it mean to be a playwright or an actor? How do relationships evolve over the course of many years? Exploring family, friendship and love, this is a novel about identity, calling into question the ideas we hold about who we are and showing how the past informs the present in ways we might never have imagined.
WINNER: Home by Marilynn Robinson	Jack – prodigal son of the Broughton family, godson and namesake of John Ames (main protagonist of Robinson’s previous novel), gone twenty years, has returned home looking for refuge and to try to make peace with a past littered with trouble and pain. A bad boy from childhood, an alcoholic who cannot hold down a job, Jack is perpetually at odds with his surroundings and with his traditionalist father, though he remains Broughton’s most beloved child.
Burnt Shadows by Kamila Shamsie	In a prison cell in the US, a man stands trembling, naked, fearfully waiting to be shipped to Guantánamo Bay. How did it come to this? August 9th 1945, Nagasaki. Hiroko Tanaka steps out onto her veranda, taking in the view of the terraced slopes leading up to the sky. Wrapped in a kimono with three black cranes swooping across the back, she is twenty-one, in love with the man she is to marry, Konrad Weiss. In a split second, the world turns white. In the next, it explodes with the sound of fire and the horror of realisation. In the numbing aftermath of a bomb that obliterates everything she has known, all that remains are the bird-shaped burns on her back, an indelible reminder of the world she has lost.