We’re delighted to announce that The Submission by Amy Waldman has been shortlisted for the Guardian First Book Award 2011. The winner will be announced at a ceremony on December 1st.

The full shortlist is:

Pigeon English, Stephen Kelman (Bloomsbury)
The Emperor of All Maladies, Siddhartha Mukherjee (Fourth Estate)
Down The Rabbit Hole, Juan Pablo Villalobos (And Other Stories)
The Collaborator, Mirza Waheed (Viking)
The Submission, Amy Waldman (William Heinemann)

http://www.guardian.co.uk/books/2011/nov/11/guardian-first-book-award-shortlist

Amy Waldman was the co-chief of the South Asia bureau of The New York Times. Her fiction has appeared in The Atlantic and the Boston Review and is anthologized in The Best American Nonrequired Reading 2010. She lives with her family in Brooklyn. William Heinemann published the hardback on August 18th and the paperback will be published by Windmill in June 2012.

Praise for The Submission

‘Amy Waldman’s debut novel is the most successful yet at making sense of 9/11…Writing the “9/11″ novel has, at times, seemed like a test (and a race), a cunningly thought-out exercise to try the mettle of some of the brightest and best in the class. Novelists were quick to take up the challenge: Don DeLillo’s Falling Man, Colum McCann’s Let the Great World Spin, Joseph O’Neill’sNetherland, Claire Messud’s The Emperor’s Children, Paul Auster’s Man in the Dark, John Updike’s Terrorist, Martin Amis’s “The Last Days of Muhammad Atta”, Jonathan Safran Foer’s Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close…[TheSubmission] is the best 9/11 novel to date… intelligence and wit, in accomplished prose. This is a deeply thoughtful and moving account of the myriad ways in which, when the towers came down, the US psyche became a casualty too.’ Michael Prodger, Financial Times

‘The grief surrounding 9/11 is central to this exceptional debut about a changing America…The novel centres on Khan and the three family members. Through their stories and interactions Waldman builds a tale of complexity and tension…Waldman’s prose is almost always pitch-perfect, whether describing a Bangladeshi woman’s relationship with her landlady or the political manoeuvring within a jury. The characters are wholly realised and believable as individuals, but they also stand in for stories and conflicts that go beyond their own lives.’ Kamila Shamsie, Guardian, Book of the Week

‘An absorbing, accomplished debut…Waldman [has a] feel for novelistic light and shade and an instinct for chasing down telling, surprising details…Waldman’s sensitivity to the multidimensionality of the issues is matched by an observant eye for the details of social interaction…This knack for shaping scenes, along with judicious intercutting between various elements, make Waldman’s novel an intelligent, satisfying read.’ Sunday Times