Jason Steger
April 18, 2008

ANCIENT wisdom has it that the third time can be the lucky one. In which case, Melbourne novelist Steven Carroll might feel this could be his year to win the Miles Franklin Literary Award, the shortlist for which was announced yesterday.

Carroll has been listed for the third time for The Time We Have Taken, the third in his trilogy of novels beginning in the late ’50s that follows the fortunes of his protagonist Michael from his early adolescence in the far-reaches of Melbourne suburbia.

Both The Art of the Engine Driver and The Gift of Speed were shortlisted for the $42,000 Miles, which remains Australia’s most significant prize for fiction even if, with the advent of the Prime Minister’s $100,00 fiction prize, it is no longer the richest.

The Time We Have Taken has already won the Commonwealth Writers’ Prize best book for the South-East Asia and South Pacific region. The other writers on the shortlist are David Brooks (The Fern Tattoo), Rodney Hall (Love without Hope), Gail Jones (Sorry), and Alex Miller (Landscape of Farewell).

The judges said the novels shared a preoccupation with “problems of time and identity in both private and public life”.

But if the power of three is pertinent, then Carroll faces significant competition from Jones, who is also shortlisted for the third time, and Miller and Hall, each of whom could win his third Miles Franklin.

Carroll said he was contemplating another novel in his series, but was not sure if the “legs are there for a fourth. I won’t know until I start writing.”

What excited him about his shortlisting was the history that came with the award. “Look at the line of authors who have been shortlisted and won — I reckon I’ve studied half of them,” he said.

One of the criteria for the award is that it should be about some aspect of Australian life, and Brooks, who is shortlisted for the first time, said he was relieved to have been included as his previous novel, The House of Balthus, and his next had virtually no Australian content.

The winner will be announced on June 19.

â–  Three Victorian novelists have been shortlisted for the $20,000 NSW Premier’s Christina Stead prize for fiction.

Gregory Day (Ron McCoy’s Sea of Diamonds), Michelle de Kretser (The Lost Dog) and Alex Miller, join J. M. Coetzee (Diary of a Bad Year), Matthew Condon (The Trout Opera), and Tom Keneally (The Widow and her Hero on the list.

Jason Steger launched The Time We Have Taken in March last year.

by Anne Enright

The nine surviving children of the Hegarty clan gather in Dublin for the wake of their wayward brother Liam. It wasn’t the drink that killed him – although that certainly helped – it was what happened to him as a boy in his grandmother’s house, in the winter of 1968. His sister Veronica was there then, as she is now: keeping the dead man company, just for another little while.

THE GATHERING is a family epic, condensed and clarified through the remarkable lens of Anne Enright’s unblinking eye. It is also a sexual history: tracing the line of hurt and redemption through three generations – starting with the grandmother, Ada Merriman – showing how memories warp and family secrets fester. This is a novel about love and disappointment, about thwarted lust and limitless desire, and how our fate is written in the body, not in the stars.

THE GATHERING sends fresh blood through the Irish literary tradition, combining the lyricism of the old with the shock of the new. As in all Anne Enright’s work, fiction and non-fiction, this is a book of daring, wit and insight: her distinctive intelligence twisting the world a fraction, and giving it back to us in a new and unforgettable light.

by Garry Disher

THE FOURTH CHALLIS & DESTRY NOVEL

He waited by the van’s open door, a clipboard in his hand. Surely she’d be along soon, dreamily pumping the pedals of her bike, helmet crooked on her gleaming curls, backpack bumping against her downy spine.

Twice now he’d watched her take this detour after school, down to the waterfront reserve, to the magic of the Waterloo Show. Dodgem cars, Ferris wheel, fairy floss on a stick. The Show was a magnet to all kinds of kids, but he had chosen only one.

Ten-year-old Katie Blasko is missing.

Detective Sergeant Ellen Destry, alert to rumours of a paedophile ring operating on the Peninsula, is thinking abduction. Her colleagues are thinking bad family, truancy. Her boss is thinking about the media. And everyone, including Ellen, is wondering whether she’s good enough to handle this without D. I. Challis.

But Hal Challis is a thousand kilometres away, watching his father die. Ellen Destry’s running the show on her own. And if she’s right, Katie Blasko may be running out of time.

Praise for Chain of Evidence

‘As proof of the continuing high standard of Australian crime novels and thrillers, you need only pencil in Garry Disher’s Chain of Evidence as exhibit A.’ The Australian

About the Author

Garry Disher grew up in South Australia. In 1978 he was awarded a creative writing fellowship to Stanford University, where he wrote his first short-story collection. A full-time writer for many years, he is the author of more than forty titles—fiction, children’s books, anthologies, history textbooks, books about the craft of writing, and the Wyatt thrillers. With considerable local and international success—including the prestigious German Crime Fiction Prize—Disher is one of our most exciting, compassionate and diverse writers.

Paperback (C format) | ISBN: 9781921145414 | RRP: $32.95 | 384pp

The Shortlist is:

* Darkmans by Nicola Barker (4th Estate)
* The Gathering by Anne Enright (Jonathan Cape)
* The Reluctant Fundamentalist by Mohsin Hamid (Hamish Hamilton)
* Mister Pip by Lloyd Jones (John Murray)
* On Chesil Beach by Ian McEwan (Jonathan Cape)
* Animal’s People by Indra Sinha (Simon & Schuster)

Details http://awards.beaumarisbooks.com.au/4083/

This longlist of 13 books, the ‘Man Booker Dozen’, was chosen from 110 entries; 92 were submitted for the prize and 18 were called in by the judges.

The longlist is:

• Darkmans by Nicola Barker (4th Estate)
• Self Help by Edward Docx (Picador)
• The Gift Of Rain by Tan Twan Eng (Myrmidon)
• The Gathering by Anne Enright (Jonathan Cape)
• The Reluctant Fundamentalist by Mohsin Hamid (Hamish Hamilton)
• The Welsh Girl by Peter Ho Davies (Sceptre)
• Mister Pip by Lloyd Jones (John Murray)
• Gifted by Nikita Lalwani (Viking)
• On Chesil Beach by Ian McEwan (Jonathan Cape)
• What Was Lost by Catherine O’Flynn (Tindal Street)
• Consolation by Michael Redhill (William Heinemann)
• Animal’s People by Indra Sinha (Simon & Schuster)
• Winnie & Wolf by A.N.Wilson (Hutchinson)

Lloyd Jones has won Overall Best Book in this year’s prestigious Commonwealth Writers’ prize. Jones was awarded the £10,000 prize at the Calabash International Literary Festival in Jamaica on Sunday 27 May. Mister Pip triumphed over acclaimed novels from Africa, Europe and South Asia, Canada and the Caribbean, including UK author Naeem Murr’s The Perfect Man. Lloyd Jones is the first New Zealand writer to win best book since Janet Frame in 1989.

‘This mesmerizing story shows how books can change lives
in utterly surprising ways.’ Nicholas Hasluck, chair of the judging panel.

Last year, the Prize was won by Kate Grenville’s The Secret River, also published by Text.

Lloyd Jones
Mister Pip
Paperback (C format) | ISBN: 9781921145575 | RRP: $29.95 | 256pp

About this book
WINNER OF THE 2007 COMMONWEALTH WRITERS’ PRIZE

You cannot pretend to read a book. Your eyes will give you away. So will your breathing. A person entranced by a book simply forgets to breathe. The house can catch alight and a reader deep in a book will not look up until the wallpaper is in flames.

After the trouble starts and the soldiers arrive on Matilda’s tropical island, only one white person stays behind. Mr Watts wears a red nose and pulls his wife around on a trolley. The kids call him Pop Eye. But there is no one else to teach them their lessons. Mr Watts begins to read aloud to the class from his battered copy of Great Expectations, a book by his friend Mr Dickens.

Soon Dickens’ hero Pip starts to come alive for Matilda. She writes his name in the sand and decorates it with shells. Pip becomes as real to her as her own mother, and the greatest friendship of her life has begun.

But Matilda is not the only one who believes in Pip. And, on an island at war, the power of the imagination can be a dangerously provocative thing.

• Careless (Deborah Robertson, Picador)
• Carpentaria (Alexis Wright, Giramondo)
• Dreams of Speaking (Gail Jones, Vintage)
• Theft: A Love Story (Peter Carey, Knopf)

The judges pronounced Carey in ‘impressive form’ and his novel ‘splendid and fantastical fiction’; Jones’ Dreams of Speaking was described as ‘a poignant love story, and a portent of hope’; Robertson’s novel was praised as ‘fine, subtle writing with a tension running throughout the story’; while Wright’s Carpentaria, ‘a powerful novel about the Gulf country’, was described as ‘a big novel in every sense.’ ‘Richly imagined and stylistically ambitious, it takes all kinds of risks and pulls them off with the confidence and assurance of a novelist who has now discovered her true power.’

This year’s winner, who will receive $42, 000, will be announced at a gala dinner at the State Library of New South Wales on 21 June.

More Detail http://awards.beaumarisbooks.com.au/4981/

Published April 17, 2007

Shhhh, don’t tell anyone, but a science fiction novel just won the Pulitzer Prize for fiction.

Of course, no one is willing to admit that Cormac McCarthy’s brilliant novel The Road is a work of science fiction. But this is symptomatic of a recurring pattern with books of this sort. The tremendous creativity on display in the world of speculative fiction is masked by a conspiracy of book stores and publishing houses to keep high quality works out of the genre categories.

So you won’t see Cormac McCarthy’s book on the shelves alongside Philip K. Dick and Robert Heinlein any time soon. The same is true of George Orwell’s 1984, Aldous Huxley’s Brave New World, Margaret Atwood’s The Handmaid’s Tale, Audrey Niffenegger’s The Time Traveler’s Wife, Kazuo Ishiguro’s Never Let Me Go, and many other examples. If the science fiction category strikes many readers as unbearably lowbrow, perhaps it is a self-fulfilling prophecy.

In previous works, Cormac McCarthy has depicted gritty, unforgiving landscapes, usually located in the American Southwest and across the border in Mexico. His tales are marked by conflict and violence. McCarthy is to American fiction what Sam Peckinpah is to Hollywood film. His heroes rarely triumph, they struggling merely to survive.

But McCarthy has never painted a bleaker picture than in The Road. The novel opens in the aftermath of an apocalypse. Details are never provided, but some event of mass destruction has left behind a nuclear winter. Cities are demolished, food supply is scanty, and roving gangs of marauders terrorize the isolated survivors.

In this unforgiving world, a man and his son struggle to reach the coast, where they hope to find other survivors and fresh supplies. McCarthy builds his story around the constant risks and challenges faced by this pair on their dangerous journey. Many things remain unsaid – the cities are unnamed, the protagonists as well, the historical setting is left an enigma. Instead the reader is presented with the human dimension of the story in all its starkness and immediacy.

The novel has a relentless, cinematic quality to its development. But, as always with McCarthy, the psychological aspects also come to the forefront. He builds up the tension in his account to an almost unbearable level. As I read through The Road, I wanted at times to put it down, so overwhelming was the intensity of the narrative. But I felt equally compelled to read on, caught up in the descriptions and unfolding events of this powerful work of literature.

The Road is a major work by a leading American writer. It also serves as testimony to the power of speculative fiction to infuse new life and energy into mainstream fiction. But however you classify it, this cautionary tale is a must-read book.

The judges’ list was announced by the chair of judges, Professor Elaine Showalter, at a press conference held yesterday at Massey College, Toronto. The 15 writers come from 10 countries and four are writers in translation.

The 15 authors on the list are:

• Chinua Achebe
• Margaret Atwood
• John Banville
• Peter Carey
• Don DeLillo
• Carlos Fuentes
• Doris Lessing
• Ian McEwan
• Harry Mulisch
• Alice Munro
• Michael Ondaatje
• Amos Oz
• Philip Roth
• Salman Rushdie
• Michel Tournier

Worth £60,000 (A$137,000) to the winner, the prize is awarded once every two years to ‘a living author who has published fiction either originally in English or whose work is generally available in translation in the English language.’ The Man Booker International Prize was announced in June 2004 and ‘recognises one writer for his or her achievement in fiction.’ The winner is chosen solely at the discretion of the judging panel; there are no submissions from publishers.

Albanian writer Ismail Kadaré won the inaugural prize in 2005 and went on to gain worldwide recognition for his work. In addition, there is a separate prize for translation and, if applicable, the winner can choose a translator of his or her work into English to receive a prize of £15,000 (A$34,000).

The winner of the 2007 prize will be announced on 28 June at a ceremony at Christ Church, Oxford, in the UK.

The judging panel for the 2007 Man Booker International Prize is: Professor Elaine Showalter, academic and author; Nadine Gordimer, writer and novelist; and writer and academic, Colm Tóibin. In announcing their list, the judges commented: ‘With this list, we offer a gift to readers all over the world, an opportunity to join a conversation on 15 writers, diverse in nationality, language, themes and techniques, but united in their dedication to the power of the word.’

www.manbookerinternational.com

Allen & Unwin writes: we recently received the sad news that Faber author Michael Dibdin died in Seattle on Friday 30 March after a short illness. He was a much-loved author with tens of thousands of devoted readers, and was also a brilliant critic.

Faber & Faber published Michael Dibdin’s books for over 20 years and his 18th thriller End Games, featuring his wonderful Italian detective Aurelio Zen, is a fittingly clever, vivid and funny novel, that will be published in Australia in September this year.