Here’s the big six titles of Australian writing as nominated by our peers in the book selling industry!
Book award news! Stella Prize Shortlist
The Stella Prize for 2019 has been released!
The Stella Prize is a major literary award celebrating Australian women’s writing, and an organisation that champions cultural change.
The six books are concerned with the most important questions of how to live now, and writers demonstrate first-rate critical thinking capabilities, tremendous imagination and a readiness to take risks with form.
the bridge – enza gandolfo
Drawing on true events of Australia’s worst industrial accident—a tragedy that still scars the city—The Bridge is a profoundly moving novel that examines class, guilt, and moral culpability. Yet it shows that even the most harrowing of situations can give way to forgiveness and redemption. Ultimately, it is a testament to survival and the resilience of the human spirit.
The erratics – Vicki laveau-harvie
We've been disowned and disinherited: there's not changing it, I say. When something bad happens to them, we'll know soon enough and we'll deal with it together. I don't realise it at the time, but when I say that, I imply I care. I imply there may be something to be salvaged. I misspeak. But I'm flying out anyway. Blood calls to blood; what can I tell you.
Winner of the 2018 Finch Memoir Prize
little gods – jenny ackland
Little Gods is a novel about the mess of family, about vengeance and innocence lost. It explores resilience and girlhood and questions how families live with all of their complexities and contradictions. Resonating with echoes of great Australian novels like Seven Little Australians, Cloudstreet, and Jasper Jones, Little Gods is told with similar idiosyncrasy, insight and style.
too much lip –melissa lucashenko
Kerry plans to spend twenty-four hours, tops, over the border. She quickly discovers, though, that Bundjalung country has a funny way of grabbing on to people. Old family wounds open as the Salters fight to stop the development of their beloved river. And the unexpected arrival on the scene of a good-looking dugai fella intent on loving her up only adds more trouble – but then trouble is Kerry’s middle name.
Gritty and darkly hilarious, Too Much Lip offers redemption and forgiveness where none seems possible.
pink mountain on locust island – Jamie Marina Lau
In bursts of fizzing, staccato and claustrophobic prose, this modern Australian take on the classic hard-boiled novel bounces you between pulverised English, elastic Cantonese and the new dialect of a digitised world.
Embracing the noir tradition and featuring a prose style quite unlike any before, with references that will go both over your head and under your feet, Pink Mountain on Locust Island will flip readers upside down and turn your understanding of the world around around.
Winner of the 2018 Melbourne Prize for Literature’s Readings
axiomatic – Maria Tumarkin
The past shapes the present — they teach us this in schools and universities. But the past cannot be visited like an ageing relative; the past doesn’t live in little zoo enclosures. So, how to speak of the searing, unpindownable power that the past — ours, our family’s, our culture’s — wields now?
Beliefs — or intuitions — about the role the past plays in our present are often evoked as if they are timeless and self-evident truths. It is precisely because they are neither, yet still we are persuaded by them, that they tell us a great deal about the forces that shape our culture and the way we live.
Local Spotlight: The Bus Ticket & The Orchardist's Daughter
Pick up something from the Tasmanian scene with either of these two new fiction titles…
The Bus Ticket – Susan Walker
Tasmanian author
Walker’s prose is interspersed with letter like formatting to create an absorbing layout that reflects her inspiration of a true Tasmanian story. The Bus Ticket is her debut into writing; the title was inspired by a collection of ANZAC documents and paraphernalia she mysteriously received at a dawn service in 2015.
It is a beautiful testament to the journey and sacrifice of families then and now, a century on. Much like a lot of work involving such a personal connection to our country’s history, The Bus Ticket will pull at your heart strings with its deep roots in reality.
A cryptic message and a mysterious photograph fall from a century-old box full of letters, papers and trinkets – an inheritance that sparks the unravelling of a tragedy kept hidden for a lifetime.
Inspired by true lives and events, The Bus Ticket is a moving story of prosperity, love and innocence lost to war, lives forever changed by events a world away, a toll paid by past generations that those of today, one century on, are still trying to understand.
The Orchardist’s Daughter – Karen Viggers
Set in Tasmania by an Australian author
Viggers is no stranger to creating a strong sense of place and connection to Tasmania’s iconic wilderness. Her previous novel The Lightkeeper’s Wife was also set in Southern Tasmania. In The Orchardist’s Daughter she has captured believable protagonists and the essence of small-town life; also inevitably scraping the surface of the anti-deforestation VS logging debate with the plot taking place in some of Tasmania’s old-growth forests.
Sixteen-year-old Mikaela has grown up isolated and homeschooled on an apple orchard in southeastern Tasmania, until an unexpected event shatters her family. Eighteen months later, she and her older brother Kurt are running a small business in a timber town. Miki longs to make connections and spend more time in her beloved forest, but she is kept a virtual prisoner by Kurt, who leads a secret life of his own.
When Miki meets Leon, another outsider, things slowly begin to change. But the power to stand up for yourself must come from within. And Miki has to fight to uncover the truth of her past and discover her strength and spirit.
“A captivating read that reflects the real Tasmania”
