At the centre of the story is the devastating mental illness that goes off like a bomb in her brain at the age of 17, leaving her with a crushing depression that incapacitates her for weeks or months at a time. Martha is thinking over her life and her marriage, trying to make sense of what went wrong. It is told from the point of view of Martha, in the aftermath of her separation with her doctor husband Patrick. Meg Mason’s debut novel, Sorrow and Bliss is the story of the ending of a marriage, of the complications within a family and about mental health. This is a book that you will read, immediately want to discuss with your friends and press into the hands of people you love. The paperback has just landed in bookshops which is why there is lots of chatter about it at the moment. For more information about the 2022 shortlist, visit the Women’s Prize website.I can’t remember the last novel that made quite so much of a splash as Sorrow and Bliss. The winner of this year’s prize will be announced on 15 June at a ceremony in London. Last year’s winner was Susanna Clarke for Piranesi (Bloomsbury). The Women’s Prize for Fiction is presented annually to the best novel of the year written in English by a woman. The shortlist was chosen from a longlist of 16, which also included Aotearoa New Zealand writer Catherine Chidgey’s Remote Sympathy (Te Herenga Waka University Press).

Sorrow and Bliss (Meg Mason, Fourth Estate).The Island of Missing Trees (Elif Shafak, Viking).Great Circle (Maggie Shipstead, Doubleday).The Bread the Devil Knead (Lisa Allen-Agostini, Myriad).The Book of Form and Emptiness (Ruth Ozeki, Canongate).Mason’s book is among six novels shortlisted for the Women’s Prize. Rights have been sold in over 20 countries, with US production company New Regency acquiring film and television rights last year. The novel was published by HarperCollins in the US and Canada in February 2021 and by Weidenfeld & Nicolson in the UK in June 2021.

Aotearoa New Zealand writer Meg Mason has been shortlisted for the £30,000 (A$52,800) Women’s Prize for Fiction for her second novel Sorrow and Bliss(Fourth Estate).įirst published in Australia in late 2020, Sorrow and Bliss is set in London and Oxford, and follows a woman trying to make sense of the mental illness that’s plagued her for decades.

Review sorrow and bliss