Award Winners

Amid the furious ocean there was no human sound on deck: some people standing, watching the wave, but no one capable of words.On the Java Ridge, skipper Isi Natoli and a group of Australian surf tourists are anchored beside an idyllic reef off the Indonesian island of Dana.In the Canberra office of Cassius Calvert, Minister for Border Integrity, a Federal election looms and (not coincidentally) a hardline new policy is being announced regarding maritime assistance to asylum-seeker vessels in distress.A few kilometres away from Dana, the Takalar is having engine trouble. Among the passengers fleeing from persecution are Roya and her mother, and Roya’s unborn sister.The storm now closing in on the Takalar and the Java Ridge will mean catastrophe for them all.With On the Java Ridge Jock Serong, bestselling author of The Rules of Backyard Cricket, brings us a literary novel with the pace and tension of a political thriller—and some of the most compelling, heartstopping writing about the sea since Patrick O’Brian.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.‘Terrifying, compelling.’ Australian Book Review‘Taut and impressive.’ Age‘You might want to clear the decks before you start Jock Serong’s third thriller, because the odds are you won’t be able to put it down.’ SA Weekend‘With this book, Serong cements his growing reputation as the thinking person’s adventure writer. On the Java Ridge is such a strong piece of writing on so many levels. Andrew Bolt would hate it!’ Readings‘Expertly written, vast in scope…A compelling literary political thriller and a must-read commentary on the Australian political environment and its treatment of refugees.’ Better Read Than Dead‘On the Java Ridge cements Serong’s place as one of Australia’s most innovative and ambitious crime writers.’ NZ Listener‘This is the mastery of Serong’s novel, understanding that fictional dystopias are at their most profound when they take the everyday and tilt it towards the darkness…it is a deeply considered novel that steers us to the logical conclusion of an entrenched system rooted equally in brutality and silence.’ Monthly‘The best surf-related fiction I have read in a long, long time, possibly ever—Jock Serong’s riveting On the Java Ridge.’ Swell Net‘The rescue and the scenes that follow it are the real heart of the book, and they are exceptional. Serong invests the chaos and confusion of the wreck and its bloody aftermath with a visceral power that makes for confronting but exhilarating reading.’ Australian‘Serong exhibits impressive control, leaping between three vastly different viewpoints and delivering a fevered crescendo as compassion competes with political survival.’ NZ Listener

It was a butcher on smoko who reported the man stashing the kid in the car boot. He didn't really know whether he'd seen anything at all, though. Maybe an abduction? Maybe just a stressed-out father.Detective Bart Moy, newly returned to the country town where his ailing, cantankerous father still lives, finds nothing. As far as he can tell no one in Guilderton is missing a small boy. Still, he looks deeper into the butcher's story - after all, he had a son of his own once.But when the boy does turn up, silent, apparently traumatised, things are no clearer. Who is he? Where did he come from and what happened to him?For Moy, gaining the boy's trust becomes central not just to the case but to rebuilding his own life. From the wreckage of his grief, his dead marriage and his fractured relationship with his father may yet come a chance for something new. A mystery, a meditation on fatherhood, a harrowing examination of love and loss: a new departure in literary crime from Stephen Orr.Stephen Orr is the author of several published works of fiction and non-fiction. His novel Time's Long Ruin was shortlisted for the Commonwealth Writers' Prize and longlisted for the Miles Franklin Award in 2011. He lives in Adelaide.'A study in character, masculinity, and specifically the relationships between fathers and sons...deftly written.' Australian Book Review'In One Boy Missing, [Orr] realises the slow rhythms of country Australia, its language and landscape...skilfully…It is great holiday reading, whether at home or abroad.' Australian Bookseller and Publisher'Orr creates an evocative landscape, the characterisations are truly wonderful, and because of that, the resolution of the crime at the heart of the novel is less important than seeing how these three can find some kind of peace with who they are and what life has done to them.' Hoopla'[Stephen Orr] is adept at partnering highly charged associations with emotionally arid landscapes.' Adelaide Advertiser'The novel is not so much a typical crime novel but a more contemplative exploration of the relationship between fathers and sons. Stephen Orr spends time drawing out his characters; foibles and the novel is all the better for his attention.' Sun Herald'Two of Orr's novels are complex variations on the themes of loss, isolation, the difficulties of putting a self back together. His prose is measured and eloquent, his imaginative reach considerable, and his next novel worth the wait.' Sydney Morning Herald/Age'Stephen Orr's detective is sunnier than Kurt Wallander, but his talkative characters and bitter realism stands comparison with Henning Mankell. He's a sincere storyteller with a flinty eye for the landscape and the sadness that drives good stories forward.' Dominion Post/Waikato Times/Weekend Press'Stephen Orr spends time drawing out his characters' foibles and the novel is all the better for his attentions.' Sunday ExaminerA study in character, masculinity, and specifically the relationships between fathers and sons…deftly written.’ Australian Book Review‘A sensitive and sometimes-moving look at a man drowning in the sorrows of his past, with a prickly relationship with his father and with a child who desperately needs to trust someone…A sweetly told tale of fatherhood and loss.’ Kirkus

When Kate Grenville’s mother died she left behind many fragments of memoir. These were the starting point for One Life, the story of a woman whose life spanned a century of tumult and change. In many ways Nance’s story echoes that of many mothers and grandmothers, for whom the spectacular shifts of the twentieth century offered a path to new freedoms and choices. In other ways Nance was exceptional. In an era when women were expected to have no ambitions beyond the domestic, she ran successful businesses as a registered pharmacist, laid the bricks for the family home, and discovered her husband’s secret life as a revolutionary.One Life is an act of great imaginative sympathy, a daughter’s intimate account of the patterns in her mother’s life. It is a deeply moving homage by one of Australia’s finest writers.Kate Grenville is one of Australia’s most celebrated writers. Her bestselling novel The Secret River received the Commonwealth Writers’ Prize, and was shortlisted for the Man Booker Prize and the Miles Franklin Literary Award. The Idea of Perfection won the Orange Prize. Grenville’s other novels include Sarah Thornhill, The Lieutenant, Lilian’s Story, Dark Places and Joan Makes History. Kate lives in Sydney and her most recent book is One Life: My Mother’s Story.‘What a difficult thing it must have been to write, but what a treasure [Grenville] has given us…Evocative and fascinating, this brave and heartfelt tribute will appeal to anyone interested in their own family story, Australian history, or the lives of women.’ Books & Publishing‘Losing your mother is a turning point in everyone’s life…Kate Grenville has translated that revelation into a totally mesmerising story which reads not like a memoir, but rather like a perfectly paced novel.’ Australian Women's Weekly‘Real life painted with with an almost fictional verve, it’s an intensely engaging portrait of a world in flux.’ New Daily‘The writing glides, egoless, through this one life that adapted to the massive changes of a century…I closed the book with regret, wanting more.’ Monthly‘[A] social history written with the storytelling skill of a novelist.’ Australian‘A gift to countless readers who will recognise their own experience, or their mother’s experience in these pages.’ Australian Book Review‘With her customary elegance and warmth, Kate Grenville has lovingly documented her mother’s life, capturing the aura of the times. I thoroughly enjoyed her engrossing story.’ Chronicle‘A tribute to a generation of tough Australian women whose stories have mostly been considered unworthy.’ North and South‘The sharing of this story of resilience, persistence and a mother’s enduring love will resonate across generations.’ Good Reading‘Not only one of the world’s greatest writers, but one of the world’s most intelligent writers, Kate Grenville does an astounding job in telling the story of her late mother in One Life.’ Booktopia, Books of the Year 2015‘One Life focuses on her mother’s specific history but in a way that resonates with us all…She makes one ordinary woman’s life seem remarkable and emblematic.’ Aviva Tuffield on ArtsHub

"From the Man Booker Prize-winning author of The Sense of an Ending, a novel about a young man on the cusp of adulthood and a woman who is already there, a love story shot through with sheer beauty, profound sadness, and deep truth. Most of us have only one story to tell. I don't mean that only one thing happens to us in our lives: there are countless events, which we turn into countless stories. But there's only one that matters, only one finally worth telling. This is mine. One summer in the sixties, in a staid suburb south of London, Paul comes home from university, aged nineteen, and is urged by his mother to join the tennis club. In the mixed-doubles tournament he's partnered with Susan Mcleod, a fine player who's forty-eight, confident, ironic, and married, with two nearly adult daughters. She is also a warm companion, their bond immediate. And they soon, inevitably, are lovers. Clinging to each other as though their lives depend on it, they then set up house in London to escape his parents and the abusive Mr. Mcleod. Decades later, with Susan now dead, Paul looks back at how they fell in love, how he freed her from a sterile marriage, and how -- gradually, relentlessly -- everything falling apart, as she succumbed to depression and worse while he struggled to understand the intricacy and depth of the human heart. It's a piercing account of helpless devotion, and of how memory can confound us and fail us and surprise us (sometimes all at once), of how, as Paul puts it, "first love fixes a life forever"--

From the Pulitzer Prize finalist and Booker Prize-longlisted author of The Moor's Account, a timely and powerful novel about the suspicious death of a Moroccan immigrant that is at once a family saga, a murder mystery and a love story, all of it informed by the treacherous fault lines of American culture. Late one spring night, Driss Guerraoui, a Moroccan immigrant in California, is walking across a darkened intersection when he is killed by a speeding car. Nora Guerraoui, a jazz composer, returns home to a small town in the Mojave after hearing that her father, owner of a popular restaurant there, has been killed in a suspicious hit-and-run car accident. Told by multiple narrators--Nora herself, Jeremy (the Iraq war veteran with whom she develops an intimacy), widow Maryam, Efrain (an immigrant witness to the accident who refuses to get involved for fear of deportation), Coleman (the police investigator), and Driss (the dead man himself), The Other Americans deftly explores one family's secrets and hypocrisies even as it offers a portrait of Americans riven by race, class, and religion, living side by side, yet ignorant of the vicissitudes that each tribe, as it were, faces"--.

Henry has ended his marriage to Caroline and headed off to Noosa with Mercedes’ grade three teacher, Martha.Caroline, having shredded a wardrobe-full of Henry’s suits, has gone after them.Craig and Lesley have dropped over briefly from next door to catch up on the fallout from Henry and Caroline’s all-night row.And Janice, Caroline’s sister, is staying for the weekend to look after the girls because Janice is the sensible one. A microbiologist with a job she loves, a fervent belief in the beauty of the scientific method and a determination to make a solo life after her divorce from Alec.Then Craig returns through the bedroom window expecting a tryst with Caroline and finds Janice in her bed, Lesley storms in with a jealous heart and a mouthful of threats, Henry, Caroline and Martha arrive back from the airport in separate taxis—and let’s not even get started on Brayden the pizza guy.Janice can cope with all that. But when Alec knocks on the door things suddenly get complicated. Harnessing the exquisite timing of the great comedies to the narrative power and emotional intelligence for which she is famous, Toni Jordan brings all her wit, wisdom and flair to this brilliant, hilarious novel. Toni Jordan is the author of four novels. The international bestseller Addition (2008), was a Richard and Judy Bookclub pick and was longlisted for the Miles Franklin award. Fall Girl (2010) was published internationally and has been optioned for film, and Nine Days was awarded Best Fiction at the 2012 Indie Awards, was shortlisted for the ABIA Best General Fiction award and was named in Kirkus Review’s top 10 Historical Novels of 2013. Her latest novel is Our Tiny, Useless Hearts (2016).

A young man journeys into Sri Lanka's formerly war-torn north, and into a country's soul, in this searing novel of love and the legacy of war from the award-winning author of The Story of a Brief Marriage. "The closest we seem to get to the present are those brief moments we stop to consider the spaces our bodies are occupying, the warmth of the sheets in which we wake, the scratched surface of the window on a train taking us somewhere else..." A Passage North begins with a message: a telephone call informing Krishan, newly returned to Colombo, that his grandmother's caretaker, Rani, has died in unexpected circumstances--found at the bottom of the village well, her neck broken. The news coincides with the arrival of an email from Anjum, a woman with whom he had a brief but passionate relationship in Delhi a few years before, bringing with it the stirring of old memories and desires. As Krishan makes the long journey by train from Colombo into the war-torn northern province for the funeral, so begins an astonishing passage into the soul of a country. At once a meditation on love and longing, and an incisive account of the impact of Sri Lanka's civil war, this procession to a pyre "at the end of the earth" shines a light on the distances we bridge in ourselves and those we love, and the indelible imprints of an island's past. Anuk Arudpragasam's masterful novel is an effigy for the missing and the dead, and a vivid search for meaning, even amid tragedy.

Now included in UQP's First Nations Classics series with an introduction from Mykaela Saunders, Plains of Promise is a masterful novel from the only writer to have won both the Miles Franklin Literary Award and the Stella Prize.In this brilliant, wide-ranging novel, Alexis Wright evokes city and outback, deepening our understanding of human ambition and failure, and making the timeless heart and soul of this country pulsate on the page.In the 1950s Gulf Country of Queensland's far North, black and white cultures collide in a thousand ways as Aboriginal spirituality clashes with the complex brutality of colonisation at St Dominic's Mission. When Ivy Koopundi and her mother arrive at the Mission, they are immediately separated and Ivy's life changes irrevocably. Years later, Mary, a young woman who is working for a city-based Aboriginal Coalition, visits the old Mission and learns of her mother's and grandmother's suffering there. Mary's return reignites community anxieties, leading the Council of Elders to again turn to their spirit world.This stunning novel, from the only writer to win both the Miles Franklin Literary Award and the Stella Prize, showcases Alexis Wright's distinctive and far-reaching talents.

Accompanied by new editions of Wright’s classic novels, Carpentaria and The Swan Book, to be released by Giramondo in May 2023.Praiseworthy is an epic set in the north of Australia, told with the richness of language and scale of imagery for which Alexis Wright has become renowned. In a small town dominated by a haze cloud, which heralds both an ecological catastrophe and a gathering of the ancestors, a crazed visionary seeks out donkeys as the solution to the global climate crisis and the economic dependency of the Aboriginal people. His wife seeks solace from his madness in following the dance of butterflies and scouring the internet to find out how she can seek repatriation for her Aboriginal/Chinese family to China. One of their sons, called Aboriginal Sovereignty, is determined to commit suicide. The other, Tommyhawk, wishes his brother dead so that he can pursue his dream of becoming white and powerful. This is a novel which pushes allegory and language to its limits, a cry of outrage against oppression and disadvantage, and a fable for the end of days.

On a beach not far from the isolated settlement of Sydney in 1797, a fishing boat picks up three shipwreck survivors, distressed and terribly injured. They have walked hundreds of miles across a landscape whose features—and inhabitants—they have no way of comprehending. They have lost fourteen companions along the way. Their accounts of the ordeal are evasive.It is Lieutenant Joshua Grayling’s task to investigate the story. He comes to realise that those fourteen deaths were contrived by one calculating mind and, as the full horror of the men’s journey emerges, he begins to wonder whether the ruthless killer poses a danger to his own family.Jock Serong is the author of Quota, winner of the 2015 Ned Kelly Award for Best First Fiction; The Rules of Backyard Cricket, shortlisted for the 2017 Victorian Premier’s Award for Fiction, finalist of the 2017 MWA Edgar Awards for Best Paperback Original, and finalist of the 2017 INDIES Adult Mystery Book of the Year; and On the Java Ridge, shortlisted for the 2018 Indie Awards.‘Serong’s prose is evocative, his dialogue convincing.’ Sydney Morning Herald‘Serong is a talented storyteller.’ Booklist‘One of Australia’s most innovative and ambitious crime writers.’ NZ Listener