Tuesday 17 January 2006

The Long List for the Romantic Novelists' Association's Foster Grant Romantic Novel of the Year was published today, and it looks something like this:

Playing with Fire by Diana Appleyard (Black Swan)
Daughter of Mine by Anne Bennett (HarperCollins)
Winds of Honour by Ashleigh Bingham (Robert Hale)
The Other Woman by Iris Gower (Bantam)
An Eligible Bachelor by Veronica Henry (Penguin)
As the Night Ends by Audrey Howard (Hodder)
Laughing as They Chased Us by Sarah Jackman (Simon & Schuster)
Gardens of Delight by Erica James (Orion)
The Borgia Bride by Jeanne Kalogridis (HarperCollins)
State of the Union by Douglas Kennedy (Random House)
Recipes for a Perfect Marriage by Mary Kate Kerrigan (Pan Macmillan)
The September Girls by Maureen Lee (Orion)
All My Sisters by Judith Lennox (Pan Macmillan)
The Ship of Brides by JoJo Moyes (Hodder)
The Tea House on Mulberry Street by Sharon Owens (Penguin)
A Lesser Evil by Lesley Pearse (Penguin)
Look the World in the Eye by Alice Peterson (Black Swan)
Lie By Moonlight by Amanda Quick (Piatkus)
The Lost Art of Telling Secrets by Eva Rice (Headline Review)
Turning Point by Bowering Sivers (Transita)
True Believer by Nicholas Sparks (Time Warner)
Falling Into Place by Linda Taylor (Heinemann)
Pond Lane and Paris by Susie Vereker (Transita)

Congratulations to all the long-listed authors. The Short List will be announced, as ever, on Valentine's Day.

Only one of these could be described as a Regency - Ashleigh Bingham's Winds of Honour. I thought that Amanda Quick's Lie by Moonlight would be one too, but it seems to be set in the early Victorian period.

And as far as I can tell, not one of these books features an elephant in a significant role. Oh well, maybe next year.

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