We are delighted to announce that two Serpent’s Tail novels have made the twenty-strong longlist for the Orange Prize.

Aifric Campbell’s ON THE FLOOR is her third novel and set in the high pressure world of international finance. Pacy and page-turning, it shows the City in 1991, charting the rise of the machine and the inability of algorithms to cope with a crucial human factor: panic. It is a gripping analysis of a woman competing in a man’s world.

Esi Edugyan’s HALF BLOOD BLUES is her second novel. Set in 1930s Berlin and Paris, it is a historical novel centring on a group of black American and Afro-German jazz musicians, trying to cut a landmark record as the Nazi war effort strengthens. It was shortlisted for the 2011 Man Booker Prize for Fiction and won the Canadian Giller Prize.

More on the prize at the Orange website.

Orange Prize for Fiction shortlist announcement: 17 April

Awards ceremony: 30 May

Under our sister imprint, The Clerkenwell Press, congratulations also to Leah Hager Cohen, whose THE GRIEF OF OTHERS is also longlisted.