A book variously panned as "airhead mush" and "Bridget Jones without the brains" has been shortlisted for the controversial Orange Prize.
The Divine Secrets of the Ya-Ya Sisterhood, by the actress Rebecca Wells, has received mountains of highly critical reviews but its feelgood plot, which centres on a group of women growing up together in New Orleans, has nonetheless become an international bestseller.
The book has even spawned a network of "sisterhood" groups, in which women gather to talk about their lives in the same way as the characters in the book. Fans call themselves Ya-Yas and refer to each other as Dahlins, in deference to the novel's gossipy southern belles.
Last night Bonnie Greer, a member of the judging panel for the women-only prize, defended the decision to shortlist a novel that she conceded was a "genre book" for Britain's richest literary award.
"You should not always be confined by the strictures of high literature. You have to go sometimes with books that make a real emotional impact, that really relate to what women are reading out there," she said. "It's by far the best genre book I've ever read and it's deceptively difficult to make writing look as easy as Wells does."
Fiona Pitt-Kethley, the poet and critic, attacked the judges' decision. "I don't know what a book like this is doing on the list. If they want a genre book why don't they go for some crime fiction, which is often very good and always ignored."
The six-strong shortlist for the £30,000 prize, which was leaked yesterday, a fortnight before it was due to be announced, contained a number of other shocks. Anita Desai, who narrowly missed out on the Booker Prize with Fasting, Feasting, did not make the final reckoning. Neither did Julia Leigh's first novel, The Hunter - about a man who goes in search of the extinct Tasmanian tiger - despite ecstatic reviews.
Despite the populist appeal of the Ya-Ya phenomenon, the clear favourite is Zadie Smith's White Teeth, a sprawling dispatch from multicultural London.
The Guardian writer Linda Grant's When I Lived in Modern Times, set during the creation of Israel, is also widely tipped.
Ms Greer said the judges - who include Ffion Hague, the wife of the Tory party leader William Hague - had gone for "strong voices".
"We did not know about Ya-Ya groups, but it shows that it has struck a chord. Hopefully the women who read it may move on to Zadie Smith or Linda Grant," she said.
Catherine E Walshe, a 72-year-old member of a Ya-Ya group in Cork, said she had no time for critics of the book. "I have no hesitation in stating that the Divine Secrets of The Ya-Ya Sisterhood should be compulsory for all women. It is a more than digestible analysis of female family conflict that is endemic to our sex.
"One emerges from the reading of it emotionally exhausted but sated and high from the experience."
Unlike previous years, in which US fiction has dominated the award, the shortlist this time is almost equally split between North Americans and writers from the British Isles.
Last year the chair of the judges, Lola Young, caused a storm by comparing British fiction writers unfavourably with Americans.
The full shortlist is: If I Told You Once, by Judy Budnitz; When I Lived in Modern Times, by Linda Grant; The Dancers Dancing, by Éilis Ni Dhuibhne; White Teeth, by Zadie Smith; Amy and Isabelle by Elizabeth Strout; The Divine Secrets of the Ya-Ya Sisterhood, by Rebecca Wells.
• The winner will be announced on June 6.
Useful links
Young novelist on Orange list: the long list is announced
Observer review of When I Lived in Modern Times
Guardian review of When I Lived in Modern Times
Read an Oserver review of White Teeth
Read a Guardian review of White Teeth
