Scottish-born writer's tale of war-torn Sierra Leone is nominated for Orange Prize

Aminatta Forna was born in Bellshill in 1964 and was six months old when she moved with her family to Sierra Leone, where her father, a doctor, became finance minister. She was only ten when he was taken from the family home by members of the secret police, and he was hanged for treason the following year.

Like The Devil That Danced on the Water, her 2002 memoir about tracking down the men whose lies led to her father's execution, and her first novel, Ancestor Stones (2007), her Orange-shortlisted novel The Memory of Love is also set in Sierra Leone. The novel has already won the Africa Best Book category of the Commonwealth Writers' Prize.

The central character, Elias Cole, is a dying academic reflecting on the compromises he had to make as the country fell under dictatorship, leading up to the horrendous civil war. Now that civil war is over, and Kai Mansaray, a charismatic young surgeon, is making plans to leave the country for good.

The novel looks back past the civil war to the halcyon days when ordinary people did not have to make the choice between betraying their ideals and endangering their families. But although the surgeon has seen the full, close-up horror of his country tearing itself apart, the book is not without hope.

Unusually, this year half of the shortlist is made up of debut novels.

Two of them look at unusual childhoods – Canadian writer Kathleen Winter's Annabel, about a hermaphrodite child raised as a boy, and London former teacher Emma Henderson's Grace Williams Says It Loud, about a mentally ill child's friendship with an epileptic boy.

Serbian-American writer Tea Obreht, the third debut writer, is, at just 24, by far the youngest on the shortlist. Ostensibly the tale of a young doctor's search for her grandfather in a war- ravaged Balkan country, it wanders in and out of fable with an assured ease. On such a thematically gloomy shortlist, the brio of Obreht's style could stand her in good stead.

Two authors who have already had worldwide bestsellers complete the list. American writer Nicole Krauss has already been shortlisted for the Orange Prize for her 2005 novel The History of Love. She is in the running again with Great House, a powerful linked story about disappearances – one involving a Chilean poet in the 1970s, another a Hungarian writer whose study is plundered by the Nazis.

Almost certainly the bookies' favourite, however – if for no reason other than it has already appeared on so many shortlists – is Irish novelist Emma Donoghue's seventh book, Room. The story of a five-year-old boy who has been brought up entirely in an 11-foot square room, never being allowed out through its locked door. It was an early favourite for last year's Man Booker Prize winning the Irish Book of the Year and – because Donoghue now lives in Canada – the Canadian and Caribbean Best Book category in the Commonwealth Writers' Prize.

Bettany Hughes, chair of the judges for this year's Orange Prize, said last night that the presence of so many first-time novelists was proof of the vitality of contemporary women's writing.

Referring to the shortlist as a whole, she continued: "There are no subjects these authors don't dare to tackle.

"Even though the stories in our final choices range from kidnapping to colonialism, from the persistence of love to Balkan folk-memory, from hermaphroditism to abuse in care, the books are written with such a skilful lightness of touch, humour, sympathy and passion that they all make for an exhilarating and uplifting read."

The winner will be announced at a ceremony in London on 8 June.

GRACE WILLIAMS SAYS IT LOUD

By Emma Henderson

Grace is 11 when she is dumped in a psychiatric hospital for 30 years. An unpromising subject, you might think. You'd be wrong

The Memory of love by AminatTa Forna

Sierra Leone, 1969-2001: Unsentimental, ambitious, moving account of what happens when the good do nothing and evil thrives

The Tiger's Wife by Tea Obreht

Haunting debut novel heavily hyped on both sides of the Atlantic. Stunningly effective Balkan brew of magic and realism

The great House by Nicole Krauss

Heavily symbolic novel about the importance of literature in a world of pogroms and violence. Worthy, but no page-turner

ANNABEL by Kathleen WInter

A HERMAPHRODITE is born to a working-class Canadian couple in a gender politics tale that is too right-on for its own good

ROOM by Emma Donoghue

Shades of Elizabeth Frizl's 25-year incarceration in a brilliantly realised child's-eye view of terror and tenderness