The long list for the Orange Prize for Fiction has been announced. We’d show it to you but it’s a bit… well, long. There are 20 novels on it. It’s an award only open to women, from anywhere in the world, and the winner gets £30,000 to spend on ink. The panel of judges is made up of semi-famous women picked at random.

We’d like to give you our opinion but we haven’t read any of the books because they haven’t come out in paperback yet. Tipsters that we are, however, we fancy Kate Atkinson’s Case Histories for a flutter. And not because it comes first alphabetically. Mrs Blighty is an Atkinson fan and we have heard good things about Case Histories. It’s not out in paperback until June unfortunately.