Readings.com.au: Commonwealth Writers' Prize Winners

Mister Pip

Matilda lives on an island somewhere in the Pacific-but this is no paradise. Civil war is a fact of life, though at first the village is largely left alone by the soldiers and the rebel fighters. The school is closed but then Mr Watts, the only white man on the island, steps forward to do what he can to help. He begins by reading Great Expectations aloud to his students, a chapter a day. Stories flourish on the island. While the lives of Pip and Magwitch and other Dickens' characters are transformed in their new tropical setting, the locals come to the schoolhouse to tell their own tales-about the meaning of the colour blue, about broken dreams, black birds and devil women. In Matilda's eyes, Pip is as real as any living person. He has become her friend. She writes his name in the sand and decorates it with shells. That's where the redskin soldiers see it, and decide they must track this stranger down. Who is this Mr Pip? The search to find him will have devastating consequences for Matilda, Mr Watts and the entire village.

Small Island

Reviewed by Rt. Hon. Paul Boateng MP Andrea Levy in Small Island brilliantly captures a world before the Race Relations Act and multiculturalism. A mastery of dialogue and capacity to capture mood and place makes this novel a must-read. Levy sets her work in a “Mother Country” defended by West Indians rallying, with the rest of Empire, to the call; in the Empire from whence they and others came, and in the post-war Britain which they rebuilt and settled. It is this last of which I have some childhood recollection. The wonder with which complete strangers would pat my curly hair in the streets of fifties London. The repeated questions to my white mother “Is he yours?”. The defiance, born of sometimes bitter experience, of her reply “Of course he is!”. Just daring them to say what some certainly thought. How could she? This is the context for a work that explores not just the reality of race relations during and immediately after the War, but the nature of migration and the movement of people itself. The dream, the disappointment, the dawning of new experiences for people unaccustomed to each other. A language shared but, at the same time, unfamiliar. Hortense, who joins her Jamaican ex-serviceman Gilbert in his mean little bedsitter, horrified at the place to which her husband has brought her, is simply not understood with her formal English. This is a West Indian for whom an idealised vision of Britain and its landmarks was as familiar as the Jamaica of her birth was as strange and foreign to the English. Queenie, the white landlady, has grown familiar and accustomed to the sound of the island. Many haven’t. Gilbert struggles with his own thwarted ambition, the white Bernard, Queenie’s husband takes up the White Man’s Burden in India, fighting in a world where his superiority is, as he sense, never again to go unchallenged. This is a carefully crafted story of interwoven lives. Levy writes with remarkable insight into the meanness, cruelty and pettiness of lives caught up in conflict and circumscribed by race, class and circumstance. There is passion and anger, but also warmth and humour in these lives and in her acute observation of their workings. This is an England and a world far removed from our current experience. Today’s London might truly be another country. And yet Burnley is not so very far away. We have come far and yet difference still has the capacity to stir up fearfulness. As Gilbert says ‘For me, I had just one question - let me ask the Mother Country just this one, simple question… How come England did not know me?” Panic and emptiness, the failure to connect lurk beneath the surface. We continue to live our lives locked in the legacy of Empire. This is a largely neglected period. Levy, in this great novel, does it justice.

A Distant Shore

Commonwealth Writers Prize 2004 Winner Judges' comments: 'This book speaks to our age and its entropy. The story moves with the converging lives of a middle-aged Midlands woman, declining into bewilderment, and an "illegal" who flees to England from the appalling violence of his homeland. The everyday and the appalling walk hand in hand, with utter conviction. A heartbreaking novel, A Distant Shore asks whether civilisation can possibly survive.'

Gould's Book Of Fish

Winner of the 2002 Commonwealth Writers Prize Winner of the Vance Palmer Prize for Fiction - Victorian Premier's Literary Awards 2002 "Once upon a time that was called 1828, before all fishes in the sea and all living things on the land were destroyed, there was a man named William Buelow Gould, a white convict who fell in love with a black woman and discovered too late that to love is not safe. Silly Billy Gould, invader of Australia, liar, murderer & forger, condemned to the most feared penal colony in the British Empire and there ordered to paint a book of fish. Once upon a time, there were miracles. . .

True History Of The Kelly Gang

Winner of the 2001 Man Booker Prize for Fiction.

With Ned Kelly as narrator, this is the heart-rending story of a young boy growing up in the grinding poverty of colonial Victoria and of a young man defiantly resisting the wealth and power of those who wish to destroy him. Undoubtedly Australia's most potent legend, this mythic hero and outlaw here is simply a man in full: devoted son, fretful father, and loyal friend, now speaking as if from the grave. Internationally acclaimed, True History of the Kelly Gang, written in the idiom of the famous Jerilderee letter, is a breathless adventure, both a lament and a tribute, a boy's defence of his mother, and a man's confiding letter to a daughter he will never meet.

Disgrace

A divorced, middle-aged English professor finds himself increasingly unable to resist affairs with his female students. When discovered by the college authorities, he is expected to apologise and repent in an effort to save his job, but he refuses to become a scapegoat in what he see as as a show trial designed to reinforce a stringent political correctness. He preempts the authorities and leaves his job, and the city, to spend time with his grown-up lesbian daughter on her remote farm. Things between them are strained - there is much from the past they need to reconcile - and the situation becomes critical when they are the victims of a brutal and horrifying attack. In spectacularly powerful and lucid prose, Coetzee uses all his formidable skills to engage with a post-apartheid culture in unexpected and revealing ways. This examination into the sexual and politcal lawlines of modern South Africa as it tries desperately to start a fresh page in its history is chilling, uncompromising and unforgettable.

Jack Maggs

The Booker Prize-winning author of Oscar and Lucinda returns to the nineteenth century in an utterly captivating mystery. The year is 1837 and a stranger is prowling London. He is Jack Maggs, an illegal returnee from the prison island of Australia. He has the demeanor of a savage and the skills of a hardened criminal, and he is risking his life on seeking vengeance and reconciliation. Installing himself within the household of the genteel grocer Percy Buckle, Maggs soon attracts the attention of a cross section of London society. Saucy Mercy Larkin wants him for a mate. The writer Tobias Oates wants to possess his soul through hypnosis. But Maggs is obsessed with a plan of his own. And as all the various schemes converge, Maggs rises into the center, a dark looming figure, at once frightening, mysterious, and compelling. Not since Caleb Carr's The Alienist have the shadowy city streets of the nineteenth century lit up with such mystery and romance.

A Fine Balance

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Captain Corelli's Mandolin

It is 1941 and Captain Antonio Corelli, a young Italian officer, is posted to the Greek island of Cephallonia as part of the occupying forces. At first he is ostracised by the locals, but as a conscientious but far from fanatical soldier, whose main aim is to have a peaceful war, he proves in time to be civilised, humourous - and a consummate musician. When the local doctor's daughter's letters to her fiance go unanswered, the working of the eternal triangle seems inevitable. But can this fragile love survive as a war of bestial savagery gets closer and the lines are drawn between invader and defender?

A Suitable Boy

Winner of the Commonwealth Writers Prize 1994.

Vikram Seth's novel is at its core a love story, a tale of Lata - and her mother's attempts to find a suitable boy, through love or through exacting maternal appraisal. Set in post-Independence India and involving the lives of four large families and those who orbit them, it is also a vast panoramic exploration of a whole continent at a crucial hour as a sixth of the world's population faces its first great General Election and the chance to map its own destiny.

The Ancestor Game

Winner of the 1993 Miles Frankling Literary Award.

A wonderful novel of stunning intricacy and great beauty.' - Michael Ondaatje The Ancestor Game, which Robert Dessaix described as 'one of the most engrossing books I've read in a long time', is an enthralling journey into the ancestral dreams and present dilemmas of a rich cast of characters. Steven Muir, August Spiess and his daughter Gertrude, and Lang Tzu all acknowledge a restless sense of cultural displacement, an ambivalence in their relations with the culture of European Australia. Steven left England for Australia as a young man and his one attempt at returning is unsuccessful. August Spiess, although he speaks frequently of returning to his native Hamburg, fails to make the journey, as does his daughter Gertrude. Lang Tzu's very name defines his fate: 'two characters which in Mandarin signify the son who goes away.'

The 'game', however, does have winners. For despite their yearnings for the home of their ancestral dreams, a desire to belong somewhere that is truly their own, none of Miller s characters leaves Australia, and each in their own way comes to see that to be at home in exile may be a defining paradox of the European Australian condition: the paradox of belonging and estrangement that perhaps lies uneasily at the heart of all European cultures.

Such A Long Journey

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The Carpathians

What happens when the town of Puamahara begins to profit from its legend and the astronomers discovering the Gravity Star predict an unthinkable future? Mattina Brecon, a New Yorker, arrives in Kowhai Street, Puamahara, where her painstaking study of her neighbours is interrupted by a new kind of cataclysmic event. Mattina finds herself in possession of a Kowhai Street that is without people, language or memory.

The sly play of fictions within fictions is a tour de force of narrative, making it a deserved winner of the 1989 Commonwealth Writers Prize and the Ansett New Zealand Book Award. It was Janet Frame's last novel.