2017 Miles Franklin Short List
An Isolated Incident by Emily Maguire
When 25-year-old Bella Michaels is brutally murdered in the small town of Strathdee, the community is stunned and a media storm descends. Unwillingly thrust into the eye of that storm is Bella's beloved older sister, Chris, a barmaid at the local pub, whose apparent easygoing nature conceals hard-won wi sdom and the kind of street-smarts only experience can bring. As Chris is plunged into despair and searches for answers, reasons, explanation - anything - that could make even the smallest sense of Bella's death, her ex-husband, friends and neighbours do their best to support her. But as the days tick by with no arrest, Chris's suspicion of those around her grows. An Isolated Incident is a psychological thriller about everyday violence, the media's obsession with pretty dead girls, the grip of grief and the myth of closure, and the difficulties of knowing the difference between a ghost and a memory, between a monster and a man. PRAISE FOR EMILY MAGUIRE "At the heart of ...Emily Maguire's work lies an urgent need to pull away at the interconnecting threads of morality, society and human relationships." Sydney Morning Herald "what you get, along with a sharp mind and a keenness to investigate cultural confusions, is an engaging ability to put the vitality of the story first." Weekend Australian ...Show more
Extinctions by Josephine Wilson
Winner of the prestigious Miles Franklin AwardProfessor Frederick Lothian, retired engineer, world expert on concrete and connoisseur of modernist design, has quarantined himself from life by moving to a retirement village. Surrounded and obstructed by the debris of his life, he is determined to be mise rable, but is tired of his existence and of the life he has chosen.When a series of unfortunate incidents forces him and his neighbour, Jan, together, he begins to realise the damage done by the accumulation of a lifetime's secrets and lies, and to comprehend his own shortcomings. Finally, Frederick Lothian has the opportunity to build something meaningful for the ones he loves.Humorous, poignant and galvanising, this is a novel about all kinds of extinction - natural, racial, national and personal - and what we can do to prevent them. ...Show more
Their Brilliant Careers: The Lives of Sixteen Remarkable Australian Writers by Ryan O'Neill
Shortlisted for the 2017 Miles Franklin Literary Award Absurd, original and highly addictive . . . In Their Brilliant Careers, Ryan O'Neill has written a hilarious novel in the guise of sixteen biographies of (invented) Australian writers. Meet Rachel Deverall, who discovered the secre t source of the great literature of our time - and paid a terrible price for her discovery. Meet Rand Washington, hugely popular sci-fi author (of Whiteman of Cor) and inveterate racist. Meet Addison Tiller, master of the bush yarn, "The Chekhov of Coolabah," who never travelled outside Sydney. Their Brilliant Careers is a playful set of stories, linked in many ways, which together form a memorable whole. A wonderful comic tapestry of the writing life, this unpredictable and intriguing work takes Australian writing in a whole new direction . . . Shortlisted, 2017 NSW Premier's Literary Awards 'You have to admire O'Neill's delicious bravura. He's been one of the few short fiction writers of recent years willing to play around with the form's possibilities ... Apart from the fact there are more funny lines in O'Neill's 288 pages than there are likely to be in the entirety of Australian literature elsewhere this year, the profiles are woven smartly together, as the characters' fates and careers intertwine.' -Saturday Paper 'Ryan O'Neill combines conventions of biography and short story in an exhaustively brazen blend of Australian literary history and plausible yet gloriously bonkers invention.' -Elke Power, Readings Monthly 'Their Brilliant Careers ... brims with crackerjack wit. Pressure is subtly built; punchlines are explosive.' -Australian Book Review 'Ryan O'Neill has embarked on the task of creating a satirical, funny alternative history to Australian literature, an exercise he has achieved admirably and with brilliance.' -Writers Bloc ' Ryan O'Neill] offers a book that is a piss-take, a celebration, a revisionist history and, perhaps most impressively, exceedingly good fun.' -Dominic Amerena, the Australian 'O'Neill has arranged a beautiful board of slain waxwings, no less funny or moving for being, in the final estimate of things, no more than shadows of the never living and the forever dead.' -Adam Rivett, Sydney Morning Herald Ryan O'Neill is the author of The Weight of a Human Heart. He was born in Glasgow in 1975 and has lived in Africa, Europe and Asia before settling in Newcastle, Australia, with his wife and two daughters. His fiction has appeared in The Best Australian Stories, The Sleepers Almanac, Meanjin, New Australian Stories, Wet Ink, Etchings and Westerly. His work has won the Hal Porter and Roland Robinson awards and been shortlisted for the Queensland Premier's Steele Rudd Award and the Age Short-Story Prize. He teaches at the University of Newcastle. ...Show more
Waiting by Philip Salom
Big is a hefty cross-dresser and Little is little. Both are long used to the routines of boarding house life in the inner suburbs of Melbourne, but Little, with the prospect of an inheritance, is worrying Big by indulging in dreams of home ownership. Little's cousin, Angus, is a solitary man who designs lake-scapes for city councils, and fireproof houses for the bushfire zone. A handy man, he meets Jasmin - an academic who races in her ideas as much as in her runners. Her head is set on publishing semiotics books on semiotics, her heart is turned towards her stalled personal life. All four are waiting, for something, if not someone. I knew Philip was a poet but it was obvious to me by the final round that he was also a wonderful storyteller. As you are about to see, I was right. John Clarke Stories with flashes of poetry and sudden insight and such profound compassion that they should be labelled - WARNING: Could make the reader kinder. Send a copy to a politician. Sue Woolfe ...Show more