Thea Astley
The following novels constitute the shortlist for the 2000 Miles Franklin Award:
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Drylands Thea Astley |
Dustjacket synopsis:
"In her flat above Drylands' newsagency Janet Deakin is writing a book for the world's last reader. Little has changed
here in fifty years, except for the coming of cable TV. Loneliness is almost a religion, and still everyone knows your
business.
"But the town is being outmanoeuvred by drought and begins to empty, pouring itself out like water into sand. Small minds shrink even smaller in the vastness of the land. One man is forced out by council rates and bigotry; another sells his property, risking the lot to build his dream. And all of them are shadowed by violence of some sort - these people whose only victory over the town is in leaving it."
Quotes:
"It is impossible to put this book down. It seethes with energy and passion." - Herald Sun
"Drylands is a wake-up call for millennial Australia...Astley's brilliance rests only in her distinctive prose
style but her willingness and courage to make social statements, to assemble portraits of pain as a bridge
to compassion." - The Bulletin
First Paragraph:
'I've never sailed the Amazon. I've never reached Brazil,' she quoted, and I've never been to a literary festival or a poetry reading, she thought, and listened to poets read, awed by their own genius.
A lot of things she hadn't done. Sitting now, useless maybe, in her upstairs flat with a view of the town's pub, grocery store, unused picture show, council building and primary school skulking by the wattles near where the creek used to flow. But I might write a book - something - she decided, having the wherewithal: table, typewriter, a new ream of paper, and angry ideas.
And alone-time in the hot evenings.
Past fifty, she admitted. And had really done nothing except move from one day to the next, accepting the vagaries of personal weather. These were written on her anxious face, blinked behind her glasses; they turned up the corners of her mouth that tried to conceal its amusement in a town that went for the most explicit of laughs.
All she had to do was insert a page in the typer, adjust her kitchen chair, flex her fingers as if she were about to crash into the Rach II and begin.
From the Penguin paperback edition, 2000.
Notes:
You can read more about Thea Astley here.
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Benang Kim Scott |
Dustjacket synopsis:
"Harley, a man of Nyoongar ancestry, finds himself at a difficult point in the history of his country, family and self. As the apparently successful outcome of his white grandfather's enthusiastic attempts to isolate and breed the 'first whiteman born', he wants to be a failure. But would such failure mean his Nyoongar ancestors could label him a success? And how can the attempted genocide represnted by his family history be told?
"Oceanic in its rhythms and understanding, brilliant in its use of language of spirit, compelling in its narrative scope and style, Benang is a novel of celebration and lament, of beginning and return, of obliteration and recovery, of silencing and of powerful utterance. Both tentative and daring, it speaks to the present and a possible future through stories, dreams, rhythms, songs, images and documents mobilised from the incompletely acknowledged and still dynamic past."
Quotes:
"With quiet clarity and broad resonance, Benang plunges its readers into the emotional and historical
truths of 'half-caste' Australia. This is a work of deep, disturbing and dangerous necessity." - Carmel Bird
"Kim Scott...uses a cool, almost matter-of-fact style to brilliantly render a form of white madness that ravaged the
Australian continent in the disguise of Reason." - Amanda Lohrey
First Paragraph:
I know I make people uncomfortable, and embarrass even those who come to hear me sing. I regret that, but not how all the talk and nervous laughter fades as I rise from the ground and, hovering in the campfire smoke, slowly turn to consider this small circle of which I am the centre.
We feel it then, we share the silence.
Of course, nothing can stop a persistent and desparate cynic from occasionally shouting, 'Look, rotisserie!' or, 'Spit roast!' But no cynicism remains once I begin to sing.
From the Fremantle Arts Centre Press paperback edition, 2000.
About the Author:
Kim Scott is a descendant of peole who have always lived along the south-east coast of Western Australia and is glad to
be living in times when it is possible to explore the significance of that fact and be one among those who call
themselves Nyoongar.
Kim Scott began writing for publication shortly after he became a secondary teacher of English. His first novel, True Country, was published in 1993 and he has had poetry and short stories published in a range of anthologies.
In recent times he has received grants from the Literature Board of the Australia Council and the Western Australian Department for the Arts to enable him to devote more time to writing. He lives in Coolbellup, a southern suburb of Perth, Western Australia, with his wife and children.
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Too Many Men Lily Brett |
Dustjacket synopsis:
"It means 'too many men', a young man passing by said to Ruth. She is saying to you, you have too many men in your life. Ruth laughed. Too many men. She didn't have any men in her life.
"Ruth Rothwax is in control. She keeps her mind sound with her successful New York-based letter-writing business; she keeps her body sound by running and lifting weights. There's no one she has to report to since her three marriages ended. A good life, all in all...But there's something missing.
"Ruth has a burning need to travel with her father Edek to Poland. She needs him to help her make sense of the past - to make sense of the murder of her family. She needs him to help her understand who she is.
"So why are people staring at her as if they've seen a ghost?.
"Too Many Men is Lily Brett's most powerful and imaginative novel to date, a dazzling exploration of the places between past and present, tragedy and comedy, sanity and lunacy. It is the novel that confirms Lily Brett's unique status as one of Australia's wittiest and most loved writers."
First Paragraph:
The last time Ruth Rothwax had been with a group of Germans, she had wanted to poke their eyes out. The feeling had sprung out of her so suddenly and so unexpectedly that it had almost bowled her over. Where had this feeling come from? It had been a fully developed, ferocious wish - not some half-baked, half-hearted aggressive inclination. There had been no build-up, no preparation. One minute she was deep in her own thoughts, the next minute she wanted to gouge an old woman's eyeballs out. To stick her middle and index fingers right into those wrinkled sockets until the eyes dislodged themselves.
She had felt nauseated for hours after the incident. It had been in Poland, in Gdafisk. She had been staying at the Hotel Marta. The Marta was meant to be a luxurious hotel. But something had gone wrong. The tall, bleak building was awkward and ungainly. It stood on its large block of land, alone and unrelated to anything around it. It was impossible to feel at home at the Marta. A wind howled through the vast lobby each time the front doors were opened. And nothing was where it could be expected to be. The concierge's desk was hidden behind the women's toilets and the lifts were at the back of the building, a five-minute walk from the front desk.
The hotel was near the centre of the city. It felt as though it was in the middle of nowhere. Ruth's room was on the seventeenth floor. There was an international golf tournament on in Gdafisk, at the time. Every guest at the Marta seemed to be wearing a cap and carrying a set of golf clubs. There was a uniformity in the ensembles, too. The women wore pale sweaters and pastel pants or skirts. The men were dressed in knit tops, and plaid or patterned trousers.
From the Picador paperback edition, 1999.
About the Author:
Lily Brett was born in Germany and came to Melbourne with her parents in 1948. Her first book, The Auschwitz Poems,
won the 1987 Victorian Premier's Award for poetry, and both her fiction and poetry have won other major prizes, including
the 1995 NSW Premier's Award for fiction for Just Like That. Lily Brett is married to the Australian painter David
Rankin. They live in New York.
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What a Piece of Work Dorothy Porter |
Dustjacket synopsis:
'I've scratched your soul'
Frank whispers
fighting the needle
with clenched tooth
and clenched claw
'Count to ten, Frank'
I say gently
'I've scratched...'
Frank's eyes flickering
but still fighting
as he goes under.
"As the new Superintendent at Callan Park Psychiatric Hospital, Dr Peter Cyren must perform medical alchemy - turn diseased minds into healthy ones. But in the case of his own soul, this sacred process works irrevocably in reverse.
"Crackling with style, Dorothy Porter's stunning new work is a poetic masterpiece.
"From the bestselling author of The Monkey's Mask."
First Paragraph:
Callan Park,
Hospital for the Insane
Tonight, with my best brandy, I, Doctor Peter Samuel Cyren, in the Year of Our Lord 1968 salute Doctor Frederick Norton Manning, Victorian humanitarian, and his industrious sidekick, Sir James Bamet, architect.
Gentlemen, I salute your magnificent legacy Callan Park, Hospital for the Insane.
But where, gentlemen, oh where is the clock you designed for the top of our water-tower?
No one likes that blank space in here.
In some places it helps to know the time.
From the Picador paperback edition, 1999.
Notes:
You can read more about Dorothy Porter here.
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Isobel on the Way to the Corner Shop Amy Witting |
Dustjacket synopsis:
"Isobel Callaghan fears she is going mad. She has resigned from her job, and is trying to survive as a writer. With no
food left in her rooming-houe attic, she sets out to buy provisions from the corner shop. On the way she collapses, and
to her surprise wakes up in hospital...
"From there it's a bumpy ride to the tuberculosis sanatorium, where Isobel becomes a member of a self-contained society. The god-like doctors and an assorted, less than compatible, cast of patients help Isobel to gain hard insights about herself, and about human nature, on the slow path to recuperation. While many of the experiences recounted in this memorable novel are grim, Amy Witting manages at the same time to be continually and compassionately funny. From her humour emerges the profound, ironic wisdom by which all her writing is distiguished."
Quotes:
"Witting's ability to delicately carve and polish a startling vignette from the seemingly commonplace is unrivalled;
her empathy and wry humour are irresistible." - Bulletin
"Her reflections on human nature are eloquently drawn, intimate, compassionate and witty." - Australian
First Paragraph:
'How can I write about love,' Isobel asked herself, 'when I don't know the first thing about it?'
She sat at the typewriter staring at the blank page where George should hours ago have made his delicate, sensitive approach to Anna.
Since she had rolled that sheet into the machine, she had played a dozen games of patience, stared out from her attic window at the view of the houses across the street, eaten a baked bean sandwich, chewed a fingernail painfully down to the quick, keeping at bay the thought that the whole enterprise had been a mistake, that perhaps she couldn't write at all.
Two successful stories and a rave note from an editor and she was off. Living in an attic, how childish. Had she really supposed that three and a half flights of stairs would take her halfway up Parnassus?
From the Penguin paperback edition, 1999.
Notes:
This novel won the 2000 the Age Book of the Year Award and Fiction Prize.
You can read more about Amy Witting here.
This page and its contents are copyright © 2006 by Perry Middlemiss, Melbourne, Victoria, Australia.
Last modified: January 30, 2006.