Award Winners

Pain was Joe Grim's self-expression, his livelihood and reason for being. In 1908-09 the Italian-American boxer toured Australia, losing fights but amazing crowds with his showmanship and extraordinary physical resilience. On the east coast Grim played a supporting role in the Jack Johnson-Tommy Burns Fight of the Century; on the west coast he was committed to an insane asylum. In between he played with the concept and reality of pain in a shocking manner not witnessed before or since.

With this highly anticipated new novel, the author of the bestselling Life of Pi returns to the storytelling power and luminous wisdom of his master novel.The High Mountains of Portugal is a suspenseful, mesmerising story of a great quest for meaning, told in three intersecting narratives that touch the lives of three different people and their families, and taking us on an extraordinary journey through the last century. We begin in the early 1900s, when Tomás discovers an ancient journal and sets out from Lisbon in one of the very first motor cars in Portugal in search of the strange treasure the journal describes. Thirty-five years later, a pathologist devoted to the novels of Agatha Christie, whose wife has possibly been murdered, finds himself drawn into Tomás’s quest. Fifty years later, Senator Peter Tovy of Ottawa, grieving the death of his own beloved wife, rescues a chimpanzee from an Oklahoma research facility and takes it to live with him in his ancestral village in northern Portugal, where the strands of all three stories miraculously mesh together. Beautiful, witty and engaging, Yann Martel’s new novel offers us the same tender exploration of the impact and significance of great love and great loss, belief and unbelief, that has marked all his brilliant, unexpected novels.Yann Martel is the author of Life of Pi, the international bestseller published in more than 50 territories that has sold more than 12 million copies worldwide, won the 2002 Man Booker (among many other prizes), spent more than a year on Canadian and international bestseller lists, and was adapted to the screen in an Oscar-winning film by Ang Lee. Martel is also the award-winning author of The Facts Behind the Helsinki Roccamatios (which won the Journey Prize), Self, Beatrice and Virgil, and a book of recommended reading: 101 Letters to a Prime Minister.‘Martel fills his novel with unusual, different, interesting, and often amusing, elements...There is plenty of humour, some of it dark, some of it laugh-out-loud, almost slapstick.’ BookMooch‘[An] extravagant smorgasbord of a novel...at every turn Martel’s deft observations and quiet compassion for human suffering shine through.’ Saturday PaperMartel’s writing has never been more charming, a rich mixture of sweetness that’s not cloying and tragedy that’s not melodramatic...The High Mountains of Portugal attains an altitude from which we can see something quietly miraculous.’ Washington Post‘Martel is in a class by himself in acknowledging the tragic vicissitudes of life while celebrating wildly ridiculous contretemps that bring levity to the mystery of existence.’ STARRED Review, Publishers Weekly‘A wonderfully inventive, 20th-century-spanning odyssey that contains some of the finest writing of Martel’s career.’ Globe and Mail‘[Martel’s] depiction of loss is raw and deeply affecting—but it’s the way in which he contextualises it within formal religion that gives this book an extra dimension...Martel is not in the business of providing us with answers, but through its odd, fabulous, deliberately oblique stories, his new novel does ask some big questions.’ Telegraph‘Told in unobtrusive, clean prose, The High Mountains of Portugal has the classic feel of a parable...Fascinating and ultimately satisfying.’ Australian‘Unforgettable and highly recommended.’ Good Reading

A stand-up comedian recalls some of his darkest moments and traumatic memories from childhood on stage in front of a live audience.

In The Hours, Michael Cunningham draws inventively on the life and work of Virginia Woolf to tell the story of a group of contemporary characters who are struggling with the conflicting claims of love and inheritance, hope and despair. The novel opens with an evocation of Woolf's last days before her suicide in 1941, and moves to the stories of two modern American women who are trying to make rewarding lives for themselves in spite of the demands of friends, lovers, and family. Clarissa Vaughan is a book editor who lives in present-day Greenwich Village; when we meet her, she is buying flowers to display at a party for her friend Richard, an ailing poet who has just won a major literary prize. Laura Brown is a housewife in postwar California who is bringing up her only son and looking for her true life outside of her stifling marriage. With rare ease and assurance, Cunningham makes the two women's lives converge with Virginia Woolf's in an unexpected and heart-breaking way during the party for Richard.

Passionate, compassionate, vitally inventive and scrupulously playful, Ali Smith's novels are like nothing else. How to be Both is a novel all about art's versatility. Borrowing from painting's fresco technique to make an original literary double-take, it's a fast-moving genre-bending conversation between forms, times, truths and fictions. There's a renaissance artist of the 1460s. There's the child of a child of the 1960s. Two tales of love and injustice twist into a singular yarn where time gets timeless, structural gets playful, knowing gets mysterious, fictional gets real - and all life's givens get given a second chance.

"Anna Deerin moves to a remote Cotswold cottage to become a gardener, trying to strip away everything she's spent all her life as a woman striving for, craving the anonymity and privacy her new off-grid life provides. But when she clears the last vegetable bed and digs up not twigs but bones, the outside world is readmitted. With it comes Detective Inspector Hitesh Mistry, who has his own reasons for a new start in the village of Upper Magna. Drawn in spite of herself to this unknown woman from another time, Anna is determined to uncover her identity and gain recognition for her, if not justice. As threats to Anna and her new life grow closer, she and DI Mistry will find that this murder is inextricably bound up with issues of gender, family, community, race and British identity itself - all as relevant in decades past as they are to Anna today."--Provided by publisher.

Kate Grenville's Orange-Prize winning novel The Idea of Perfection is the story of the small town of Karakarook, and of Douglas Cheeseman and Harley Savage—two people who seem the least likely in the world to fall in love. Unlike Felicity Porcelline, a woman dangerously haunted by the idea of perfection, they come to understand that what looks like weakness can be the best kind of strength.Kate Grenville is one of Australia's finest writers. Her bestselling novel The Secret River has been published in more than twenty countries. It has received numerous awards, including the Commonwealth Writers' Prize and was shortlisted for the Man Booker Prize and the Miles Franklin Literary Award. The companion memoir, Searching for the Secret River, was released in 2006. The Idea of Perfection won Britain's prestigious Orange Prize for Fiction, and her other novels include Sarah Thornhill, The Lieutenant, Lilian’s Story, Dark Places and Joan Makes History.'An extraordinary comedy of manners.' Guardian'A rare treat to read.' The Times 'Each word, each sentence, each paragraph shines and gleams.' West Australian

The classic thriller by the five-time winner of the Ned Kelly Award. Introduction by Les Carlyon.When Mac Faraday's best friend is found hanging, the assumption is suicide. But Mac is far from convinced, and he's a man who knows not to accept things at face value. A regular at the local pub, a mainstay of the footy team, Mac is living the quiet life of a country blacksmith - a life connected to a place, connected to its people. But Mac carries a burden of fear and vigilance from his old life. And as this past of secrets, corruption, abuse and murder begins to close in, he must turn to long-forgotten resources to hang on to everything he holds dear, including his own life. Peter Temple is one of Australia's finest writers, the winner of Australia's premier prize for literature in 2010, the Miles Franklin Award, and the Victorian Premier's Literary Award for his novel Truth. Born in South Africa, Peter Temple settled in Australia in 1980 and worked as a journalist and teacher before becoming a full-time novelist. Temple has written nine novels and has won the Ned Kelly Award for crime fiction five times. Les Carlyon is the author of Gallipoli, a bestseller in Australia, Britain and New Zealand, The Great War, which was voted book of the year at the Australian Book Industry Awards, and The Master: A Personal Portrait of Bart Cummings.'Peter Temple has a way with words and the richness of his language alone makes this book rewarding...This is a great book.' Sacramento/San Francisco Book Review'Temple invests his characters' thought, speech, and deeds with an arresting immediacy and freshness.' Booklist'A wonderfully controlled piece of writing with some delightfully wry observations...the quality of the prose alone makes the book worth reading.' Opinionator'A must for thriller seekers.' Who Weekly'Fast, funny and assured.' Australian Book Review'The coolest and most elegant of Australian crime writers.' Age'Temple is a phenomenon.' Sydney Morning Herald'An Iron Rose has Temple's usual grizzled police veteran as the central character, a despicable and mystifying crime and a support crew of goodies and baddies...Temple's dry Australian vernacular and wit should be required reading for everyone above the age of 16. This edition is introduced by Les Carlyon, a better match for Temple's writing I could not imagine.' Melbourne Weekly

When beautiful 25-year-old Bella Michaels is brutally murdered in the small New South Wales town of Strathdee, the community is stunned and a full investigation gets underway as 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 and occasional sex worker, and a woman whose apparent easygoing nature conceals hard-won wisdom and the kind of street-smart only experience can bring. As Chris is plunged into despair and searches for answers, reasons, explanations - 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. Also interested in Chris is May Norman, a young, self-absorbed city journalist, who is determined that Bella's murder will be the story to launch her career. But the longer May spends in Strathdee, the more she feels unable to do the job she was sent to do, yet unwilling to leave until she knows how the story ends. 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.

Told from multiple points of view, the lives of Frankie, Jo, Phoenix, Nick, and Bella are changed forever after one of them is sexually assulted at a party--and it looks like the perpetrator might get away with it. Adopted Frankie struggles to see eye-to-eye with her mother--who would rather ignore a problem and preserve their "perfect" life than stand up for what's right. Jo just wants her mom to accept her queer identity--and is totally crushed when Frankie, the only person who really gets her, finds herself infatuated with someone new. Phoenix tries to find his place at the new school and balance wanting to spend time with Frankie but knowing he also has to help out with his sick sister at home. Bella wants to enjoy the end of high school and just head off to college without a hitch. Everyone expects Frankie's brother Nick to be the golden boy, but even though he just got into his dream school, he's not even sure he's a good person. Each of their stories intersects when Bella is sexually assaulted at a party, and it looks like the perpetrator might get away with it.