TWO former winners and four established authors feature in this year’s Miles Franklin Literary Award shortlist.
No more Boats, Felicity Castagna (Giramondo Publishing): A migrant man’s world implodes when he is forced to retire, his wife has left him and his children ignore him. The 2001 Tampa crisis is the background to his despair.
The Life to Come, Michelle de Kretser (Allen & Unwin): Revolves around three characters in Sydney, Paris and Sri Lanka, and highlights how the past and future can change the present.
The Last Garden, Eva Hornung (Text Publishing): When a man shoots his wife and himself on the day their son returns from boarding school, a small religious community is shattered. The town’s pastor and the son must come to terms with the unknowable past and the frailties of being human.
Storyland, Catherine McKinnon (HarperCollins Publishers): Set on Lake Illawarra, this is a novel of five narratives spanning four centuries. Ultimately, all the characters are connected by blood, history, place and memory, and together tell the story of Australia.
Border District, Gerald Murnane (Giramonda Publishing): The narrator has moved from Melbourne to the Wimmera Plains to spend the last years of his life. Mediating on fragments of his past, it explores the border land between life and death.
Taboo, Kim Scott (Picador Australia – Pan Macmillan Australia): Set in present-day WA, it is the story of a group of Noongar people who revisit the site of a massacre, and explores how they wrestle with the possibility of reconciliation.
The award winner will be announced in Melbourne on August 26.
