Novels and collections of short stories including work by Elizabeth Harrower, Charlotte Wood and Amanda Lohrey dominate the long list $50,000 annual Stella Prize which celebrates great books, fiction and non-fiction, by female Australian authors. The only non-fiction book to make the list is Small Acts of Disappearance : Essays on Hunger by Fiona Wright. The full long list is:
Elizabeth Harrower emerged from the lift smiling and looking slightly photobemused. Petite, with a helmet of well-cut grey hair, still nimble at 87, she later admitted this was the first time she had appeared as special guest at a public function.
Sofie Laguna has won Australia’s $60,000 Miles Franklin Literary Award for her book The Eye of the Sheep (Allen & Unwin) about a young boy trying to cope as his family implodes under the pressures of alcoholism and domestic violence. She beat other shortlisted writers Sonya Hartnett’s for Golden Boys, (Penguin Books Australia), Christine…
A new year and a whole mouthwatering world of fiction already lined up to be released over the next three months. That’s even if, like me, you still have a pile of must reads left over from 2014. Below are a few due out between now and the end of March.
A Brief History of Seven Killings by Marlon James (pub. Carcanet) about the attempted assassination of Bob Marley during the drug and gang wars of Jamaica in the 1970s.
A Spool of Blue Thread by Anne Tyler (Random House): Family saga set
2014 has been another wonderful year for literature, a classic case of so many books, so little time. I ended the year having read 80 books, predominantly fiction novels, but including one play (Mike Bartlett’s perceptive and witty King Charles 111, works of non-fiction and collections of short stories.
An Unnecessary Woman by Rabih Alameddine (Text)
The UnAmericans by Molly Antopol (W.W.Norton)
The Sound of Things Falling by Juan Gabriel Vasquez (Bloomsbury)
Colourless Tsukuru Tazaki by Haruki Murakami (Alfred A Knopf)
Thank you For Your Service by David Finkle (Text)
Beyond the Beautiful Forever by Katherine Boo (Random House)
The Golden Age by Joan London (Random House Australia)
We Are All Completely Beside Ourselves by Karen Joy Fowler (Allen & Unwin)
A Winter’s Book by Tove Jansson (A Sort of Book)
His Own Man by Ribeiro Edgard (Text):
The gender division was 66-44 per cent to the blokes, the authors came from
There are rich pickings on the crime scene with Graeme Blundell, one of my favourite followers of crime fiction, sleuthing out four new offerings (should that be a massacre of crime novels?) in his popular Crime File. The latest from Garry Disher, who has been producing literary thrillers for decades, is…