Award Winners

It starts in a suburban backyard with Darren Keefe and his older brother, sons of a fierce and gutsy single mother. The endless glow of summer, the bottomless fury of contest. All the love and hatred in two small bodies poured into the rules of a made-up game.Darren has two big talents: cricket and trouble. No surprise that he becomes an Australian sporting star of the bad-boy variety—one of those men who’s always got away with things and just keeps getting.Until the day we meet him, middle aged, in the boot of a car. Gagged, cable-tied, a bullet in his knee. Everything pointing towards a shallow grave.The Rules of Backyard Cricket is a novel of suspense in the tradition of Peter Temple’s Truth. With glorious writing harnessed to a gripping narrative, it observes celebrity, masculinity—humanity—with clear-eyed lyricism and exhilarating narrative drive. Jock Serong’s most recent novel, On the Java Ridge, a fast-paced political thriller, was published in 2017. His debut novel Quota won the 2015 Ned Kelly Award for Best First Crime Novel. The Rules of Backyard Cricket is nominated for a 2018 Edgar Allan Poe Award and was shortlisted for the 2016 Victorian Premier's Literary Award. Jock teaches law and writes feature articles in the surfing media and for publications such as The Guardian and Slow Living. He lives with his wife and four children in Port Fairy, Victoria.‘The Rules of Backyard Cricket by Jock Serong, while classified as ‘crime’, is a compelling literary novel dissecting toxic sporting culture and its fallout.’ Paddy O’Reilly, Australian Book Review, 2016 Books of the Year‘The Rules of Backyard Cricket got the thumbs up from everyone.’ Favourite Fiction for 2016, Avenue Bookstore‘My favourite reading experience of the year (and I don’t even like cricket).’ Heather Taylor Johnson, Sydney Morning Herald’s Year in Reading‘Blow me down if I didn’t hang on every word.’ Clare Wright, Best Books of 2016, Australian‘One of the great novels written about sport…Delicious. It’s the top read of the summer.’ Stuff NZ‘A deeply interesting novel about sibling rivalry, family, masculinity, and the game of cricket…Serong is a talented storyteller, and he brings this unusual world to life.’ Booklist

Greece, 1917. The great city of Salonika is engulfed by fire as all of Europe is ravaged by war. Amid the destruction, there are those who have come to the frontlines to heal: surgeons, ambulance drivers, nurses, orderlies and other volunteers. Four of them—Stella, Olive, Grace and Stanley—are at the centre of Gail Jones's extraordinary new novel, which takes its inspiration from the wartime experiences of Australians Miles Franklin and Olive King, and British painters Grace Pailthorpe and Stanley Spencer. In Jones's imagination these four lives intertwine and change, each compelled by the desire to create something meaningful in the ruins of a broken world. Immersive and gripping, Salonika Burning illuminates not only the devastation of war but also the vast social upheaval of the times. It shows Gail Jones to be at the height of her powers. Gail Jones is one of Australia's most celebrated writers. She is the author of two short-story collections and nine novels, and her work has been translated into several languages. She has received numerous literary awards, including the Prime Minister's Literary Award, the Age Book of the Year, the South Australian Premier's Award, the ALS Gold Medal and the Kibble Award, and has been shortlisted for the Miles Franklin Literary Award, the International Dublin Literary Award and the Prix Femina Étranger. Originally from Western Australia, she now lives in Sydney. 'Gail Jones is a thoughtful, accomplished writer whose work speaks for itself...Praised for her precise, incisive observations, Jones's writing frequently offers nuanced reflections on the cultural state of Australia as well as quiet revelations about the lives of her characters. Our Shadows is no exception...written like the wave that haunts its imaginative landscape, ebbing and flowing from past generations to the present and back again.' Guardian on Our Shadows

Winner of the Australian Book Industry Awards, General Fiction Book of the Year and shortlisted for the Prime Minister's Literary Award for Fiction, 2012.This is the story of Sarah Thornhill, youngest child of the family at the heart of Kate Grenville's multi-award-winning novel The Secret River. Her stepmother calls her wilful, but handsome Jack Langland loves her and she loves him. Me and Jack, she thinks, what could go wrong? But there's an ugly secret in Sarah's family. That secret takes her into the darkness of the past, and across the ocean to the wild coasts of New Zealand. Among the strangers of that other place, she can begin to understand. Sarah Thornhill, a novel by one of our greatest writers, is about love lost and found, tangled histories, and how it matters to keep stories alive. 'Grenville inhabits characters with a rare completeness...She writes with a poet's sense of rhythm and imagery.' GuardianKate Grenville is one of Australia's most celebrated writers. Her bestselling novels, which have won many awards and have been published around the world, include The Secret River (shortlisted for the Man Booker Prize), Lilian's Story, The Idea of Perfection and The Lieutenant.'Sarah Thornhill is the book of a writer of the first rank and there are plenty of things in it that are powerfully realised and that touch the heart...she is a gift of a writer...a haunting performance.' Age'A beguiling love story...The voice of illiterate Sarah, in which the whole story is told, is Grenville’s great triumph…The book is a moving double love story - of a wild, romantic love and a slower, more mature, developing variety - an imaginatively convincing recreation of history and a celebration of country tenderly and beautifully observed, but above all it is a powerful plea for due acknowledgement and remembrance of the veils of the past...We may not be able to change the actions of the past the gave us this country, Grenville says through charismatic Sarah Thornhill, but if we are not at least mindful of them we are no better than fools or accomplices.' Adelaide Advertiser'Sarah Thornhill is a beautifully told story of early Australia and the triumphs and struggles of its convicts, free settlers and aborigines.' Australian Women's Weekly'Grenville's vivid fiction performs as testimony, memory and mourning, within this collective, post-colonial narrative.' Weekend Australian

In the shadow of Auschwitz, a flamboyant German industrialist grew into a living legend to the Jews of Cracow. This work tells the story of Oskar Schindler, who risked his life to protect Jews in Nazi-occupied Poland and who was transformed by the war into a man with a mission, a compassionate angel of mercy.

In 1980, Tom Keneally walked into a store in Beverly Hills owned by Polish Jew Leopold Pfefferberg Page to buy a new briefcase. For the next few years, Tom's life was taken over by this charismatic and driven man, known as Poldek, and the story he wanted shared. The resulting book was Schindler's Ark, which went on to win the Booker Prize and ultimately became the Oscar-award-winning film Schindler's List. Tom and Poldek travelled across the US, Germany, Israel, Austria and Poland, interviewing survivors and discovering their extraordinary stories. Searching For Schindler is very much Tom's journey; he reflects on his early days as a successful but less than confident writer, and how this book, the film it became and the people he met, changed his and his family's lives forever.

Anita Jacoby AM is one of Australia's most distinguished television producers. Now she uncovers one of the most extraordinary stories of all, long hidden within her own family. The father Anita knew had fled persecution in Nazi Germany to settle in Australia and become a pioneer of the Australian communications industry. He was known and respected in the entertainment, political and business worlds. But he also had a devastating secret life. In her quest to establish the truth, Anita combines being a loving daughter with her investigative journalist skills, determined to find everything concealed from her family for more than seventy years. But by turning the camera on her father she's forced to question everything about him - and what she thought she knew about herself. And in discovering his secrets, she's compelled to reveal her own. This very Australian story is one of tragedy and rebirth, resilience and change. It's about love, grief, and the sacrifices parents make for their children. It's a story that proves that children, no matter how old or wise they become, never truly know their parents.

Winner of the 2015 National Book Critics Circle Award in FictionNamed one of the best books of 2015 by The New York Times Book Review and the Wall Street JournalBorn in the "agrarian ghetto" of Dickens―on the southern outskirts of Los Angeles―the narrator of The Sellout resigns himself to the fate of lower-middle-class Californians: "I'd die in the same bedroom I'd grown up in, looking up at the cracks in the stucco ceiling that've been there since '68 quake." Raised by a single father, a controversial sociologist, he spent his childhood as the subject in racially charged psychological studies. He is led to believe that his father's pioneering work will result in a memoir that will solve his family's financial woes. But when his father is killed in a police shoot-out, he realizes there never was a memoir. All that's left is the bill for a drive-thru funeral.Fuelled by this deceit and the general disrepair of his hometown, the narrator sets out to right another wrong: Dickens has literally been removed from the map to save California from further embarrassment. Enlisting the help of the town's most famous resident―the last surviving Little Rascal, Hominy Jenkins―he initiates the most outrageous action conceivable: reinstating slavery and segregating the local high school, which lands him in the Supreme Court.

In The Settlement, Jock Serong reimagines in urgent, compelling prose the ill-fated exploits of George Augustus Robinson at the settlement of Wybalenna—a venture whose blinkered, self-interested cruelty might stand for the colonial enterprise itself. On the windswept point of an island at the edge of van Diemen's Land, the Commandant huddles with a small force of white men and women. He has gathered together, under varying degrees of coercion and duress, the last of the Tasmanians, or so he believes. His purpose is to save them—from a number of things, but most pressingly from the murderous intent of the pastoral settlers on their country. The orphans Whelk and Pipi, fighting for their survival against the malevolent old man they know as the Catechist, watch as almost everything about this situation proves resistant to the Commandant's will. The wind, the spread of disease, the strange black dog that floats in on the prow of a wrecked ship... But above all the Chief, the leader of the exiles, before whom the Commandant performs a perverse, intimate dance of violence and betrayal. 'An extraordinarily vivid imagining of one of the most significant encounters in Australian history.' AMANDA LOHREY 'Grips from the first page. It's unsentimental, truthful and profound – all in a milieu effortlessly imagined.' DON WATSON

Colombo, 1990. Maali Almeida, war photographer, gambler and closet queen, has woken up dead in what seems like a celestial visa office. His dismembered body is sinking in the Beira Lake and he has no idea who killed him. At a time when scores are settled by death squads, suicide bombers and hired goons, the list of suspects is depressingly long, as the ghouls and ghosts who cluster around him can attest.But even in the afterlife, time is running out for Maali. He has seven moons to try and contact the man and woman he loves most and lead them to a hidden cache of photos that will rock Sri Lanka. .Ten years after his prizewinning novel Chinaman established him as one of Sri Lanka’s foremost authors, Shehan Karunatilaka is back.The Seven Moons of Maali Almeida is a scathing, rip- roaring epic. It proves that the best fiction can offer the deeper truth.