Readings.com.au: Australia-Asia Literary Award 2008 Longlist

Diary Of A Bad Year

A famous writer is commissioned to contribute to a book of essays called Strong Opinions when he meets a young woman who lives in his apartment tower. He asks her to become his . . .

In the laundry room of her apartment block a young woman makes the acquaintance of an ageing writer. She agrees to type up his opinions, although she is aware that what he really desires . . .

The young woman's boyfriend starts to spy on his neighbour and hatches a jealous plot to . . .

J. M. Coetzee's Diary of a Bad Year was shortlisted for the 2008 NSW Premier's Literary Award, Christina Stead Prize for Fiction, and was shortlisted for the Award for Fiction and Award for Innovation at the 2008 SA Festival Awards for Literature. It is an extraordinary and utterly original novel about loneliness, friendship and the possibility of love.

Diary of a Bad Year takes the reader from Australian democracy to Guantanamo Bay, from the meaning of dishonour to the creative truth of dreams. Written in a wholly innovative form for three simultaneous voices, Diary of a Bad Year is enthralling, unexpected and deeply moving.

The Lost Dog

Whatever the linguistic equivalent of perfect pitch may be, she has it - Sunday Telegraph (UK)

The Lost Dog is the extraordinary new novel by the acclaimed writer Michelle de Kretser. Her first novel, The Rose Grower, was a bestseller in both hardback and paperback. Her second, The Hamilton Case, won the Commonwealth Prize (SE Asia and Pacific), the Tasmania Prize and the Encore Prize, and was a New York Times Notable Book.

Set in present-day Australia and mid-20th century India, The Lost Dog is a haunting, beautifully written work that brilliantly counterpoints new cityscapes and their inhabitants with the wild, ancient continent beyond. With its atmosphere of menace and an acute sense of the unexplained in any story, The Lost Dog intriguingly highlights the collision of the primal and the civilised, modernity and the past and home and exile.

A mystery, a love story, a celebration of dogs and the joy they bring us, and a meditation on the essence of art and nature, The Lost Dog is a gripping contemporary novel which explores the weight of history as well as different ways of seeing and comprehending the world.

Orpheus Lost

In the myth, Orpheus travels to the underworld to rescue Eurydice from certain death – a rescue compelled by his determination and his belief in their shared life. Along the way the question arises: what would you risk for love? Orpheus Lost is an examination of this particular question, located in remarkable times. In modern Boston, Leela, a mathematical genius, falls in love with Australian musician Mishka. Both have escaped their past; although in doing so they have become reticent about their need to unravel their beginnings. In particular, Mishka’s quest for understanding takes him from the lushness of the Australian rainforests to bomb-scarred Boston, to secretive Baghdad. Th e consequences of this pilgrimage reach far into Leela’s past and it is here that risks and bargains must be made in order for the lovers to be reunited. Th is is a suspenseful novel. Th e penalties of remaining quiet are enormous for these characters. Janette Turner Hospital has once again demonstrated her writing power by examining ordinary people caught in the wrong times. Th is is a story that questions where our identities are formed from.

Christine Gordon is from Readings Carlton

Blood Kin

A barber, a chef and a portraitist are held hostage in a sparsely-furnished room, in a grand summer residence perched on a hill overlooking the capital city of a nameless hot country. They have been seized in a bloody coup to depose the President, their boss. In the city streets below them, chaos reigns.

With the old order ruined, the moral landscape ravaged and venality widespread, human relationships - personal and political, between lovers and within families - are being dissected, fought over, abandoned. As the tension builds and the story reaches its devastating climax, Blood Kin lays bare humanity's most animalistic and mercenary impulses: lust, vanity, ambition, artifice, betrayal, obsession and vengeance.

The locations are lavish, the detail is scrupulous, and the scope and themes are nothing short of Shakespearean. Blood Kin is a masterful, thrilling and deeply affecting debut.

The Reluctant Fundamentalist

'Excuse me, sir, but may I be of assistance? Ah, I see I have alarmed you. Do not be frightened of my beard. I am a lover of America...'

So speaks the mysterious stranger at a Lahore café as dusk settles. Invited to join him for tea, you learn his name and what led this immaculate speaker of English to seek you out. For he is more worldly than you expect; better travelled and better educated. He knows the West better than you do. And as he tells you his story, of how he embraced the Western dream - and a Western woman - and how both betrayed him, so the night darkens. Then the true reason for you meeting becomes abundantly clear...

Landscape Of Farewell

A hauntingly beautiful meditation on the land, the past, exile and friendship, Landscape of Farewell is the powerful new novel from acclaimed Australian author, Alex Miller.

It is the story of Max Otto, an elderly German academic. After the death of his much-loved wife and his recognition that he will never write the great study of history that was to be his life's crowning work, Max believes his life is all but over. Everything changes, though, when his valedictory lecture is challenged by Professor Vita McLelland, a feisty young Australian Aboriginal academic visiting Germany. Their meeting and growing friendship sets Max on a journey that would have seemed unthinkable just a few short weeks earlier.

When, at Vita's invitation, Max travels to Australia, he forms a deep friendship with her uncle, Aboriginal elder Dougald Gnapun. It is a friendship that not only gives new meaning and purpose to Max, but which teaches him the profound importance of truth-telling in reconciliation with his own and his country's past.

Following Alex Miller's Miles Franklin-winning Journey to the Stone Country, Landscape of Farewell is a wise and grave novel of power, beauty and truth.

Praise for Alex Miller

'[The Ancestor Game] is a wonderful novel of stunning intricacy and great beauty.' - Michael Ondaatje

'Miller is a master storyteller.' - Drusilla Modjeska

After Dark

The midnight hour approaches in an almost empty all-night diner. Mari sips her coffee and glances up from a book as a young man, a musician, intrudes on her solitude. Both have missed the last train home. The musician has plans to rehearse with his jazz band all night, Mari is equally unconcerned and content to read, smoke and drink coffee until dawn. They realise they've been acquainted through Eri, Mari's beautiful sister. The musician soon leaves with a promise to return before dawn. Shortly afterwards Mari will be interrupted a second time by a girl from the Alphaville Hotel; a Chinese prostitute has been hurt by a client, the girl has heard Mari speaks fluent Chinese and requests her help. Meanwhile Eri is at home and sleeps a deep, heavy sleep that is 'too perfect, too pure' to be normal; pulse and respiration at the lowest required level. She has been in this soporfic state for two months; Eri has become the classic myth - a sleeping beauty. But tonight as the digital clock displays 00:00 a faint electrical crackle is perceptible, a hint of life flickers across the TV screen, though the television's plug has been pulled. Murakami, acclaimed master of the surreal, returns with a stunning new novel, where the familiar can become unfamiliar after midnight, even to those that thrive in small hours. With After Dark we journey beyond the twilight. Strange nocturnal happenings, or a trick of the night?

The Trout Opera

The Trout Opera - more than ten years in the writing - is a stunning epic novel that encompasses twentieth-century Australia. Opening with a Christmas pageant on the banks of the Snowy River in 1906 and ending with the opening ceremony of the Sydney Olympics in 2000, it is the story of simple rabbiter and farm hand Wilfred Lampe who, at the end of his long life, is unwittingly swept up into an international spectacle. On the way he discovers a great-niece, the wild and troubled young Aurora, whom he never knew existed, and together they take an unlikely road trip that changes their lives. Wilfred, who has only ever left Dalgety once in almost a hundred years, comes face to face with contemporary Australia, and Aurora, enmeshed in the complex social problems of a modern nation, is taught how to repair her damaged life. This dazzling story - marvellously broad in its telling and superbly crafted - is about the changing nature of the Australian character, finding the source of human decency in a mad world, history, war, romance, murder, bushfires, drugs, the fragile and resilient nature of the environment and the art of fly fishing. It's the story of a man who has experienced the tumultuous reverberations of Australian history while never moving from his birthplace on the Snowy, and it asks, what constitutes a meaningful life?

The Complete Stories

David Malouf's imagination inhabits shocking violence, quick humor, appealing warmth and harsh cruelty with equal intensity. He shares tales of bookish boys, taciturn men and intimate stories of men and women looking for something they seem to have missed, or missed out on. This is a comprehensive compilation of David's shorter work. Stories are set in the stark and challenging Australian interior and the more lush and mysterious coastal enclaves; others are set in Australia's past. The youthful dreams, physical desires and mental despair of Malouf's richly varied characters as they explore their place in the world are always moving and universal. Readers won't want to skim a single page of the 31 stories in this epic collection, a few of which are novella length. Together, they represent a quarter-century of a formidable craftsman's career.

Burning In

In her late twenties, Martine Hartmann moves from Sydney to New York to pursue her career as a photographer, leaving behind her mother Lotte, a holocaust survivor. Nine years later, Martine's daughter Ruby goes missing in Central Park. Ruby's disappearance throws Martine into an emotional struggle which threatens to overwhelm her, but which also, in time, brings her to understand Lotte's anxieties and inhibitions, and to discover the act of abandonment at their heart. BURNING IN is a closely observed psychological novel with an extraordinary eye for detail, and an unerring instinct for the suppressed rhythms of thought and feeling. Structured around two mysteries and three generations of Jewish women, it is an extended meditation on loss and guilt, exploring the long shadows cast by the past on the present, and the relationship between parental love and the imperatives of survival.

Animal's People

'I used to be human once. So I'm told. I don't remember it myself, but people who knew me when I was small say I walked on two feet just like a human being...' Ever since he can remember, Animal has gone on all fours, the catastrophic result of what happened on That Night when, thanks to an American chemical company, the Apocalypse visited his slum. Now not quite twenty, he leads a hand-to-mouth existence with his dog Jara and a crazy old nun called Ma Franci, and spends his nights fantasising about Nisha, the daughter of a local musician, and wondering what it must be like to get laid. When a young American doctor, Elli Barber, comes to town to open a free clinic for the still suffering townsfolk - only to find herself struggling to convince them that she isn't there to do the dirty work of the 'Kampani' - Animal plunges into a web of intrigues, scams and plots with the unabashed aim of turning events to his own advantage. Compellingly honest, entertaining and entirely without self-pity, Animal's account lights our way into his dark world with flashes of pure joy - from the very first page all the way to the story's explosive ending. ANIMAL'S PEOPLE is a stunningly humane work of storytelling that takes us right to the heart of contemporary India.