Readings.com.au: Literary Award Winners 2009

Wolf Hall

Winner of the 2009 Man Booker Prize for Fiction.

England, the 1520s. Henry VIII is on the throne, but has no heir. Cardinal Wolsey is his chief advisor, charged with securing the divorce the pope refuses to grant. Into this atmosphere of distrust and need comes Thomas Cromwell, first as Wolsey′s clerk, and later his successor.

Cromwell is a wholly original man: the son of a brutal blacksmith, a political genius, a briber, a charmer, a bully, a man with a delicate and deadly expertise in manipulating people and events. Ruthless in pursuit of his own interests, he is as ambitious in his wider politics as he is for himself. His reforming agenda is carried out in the grip of a self-interested parliament and a king who fluctuates between romantic passions and murderous rages.

From one of our finest living writers, Wolf Hall is that very rare thing: a truly great English novel, one that explores the intersection of individual psychology and wider politics. With a vast array of characters, and richly overflowing with incident, it peels back history to show us Tudor England as a half-made society, moulding itself with great passion and suffering and courage.

Breath

Winner of the 2009 Miles Franklin Literary Award

Breath is a story about the wildness of youth - the lust for excitement and terror, the determination to be extraordinary, the wounds that heal and those that don't - and about learning to live with its passing.

In his first novel for seven years, Tim Winton has achieved a new level of mastery. Breath confirms him as one of the world's finest storytellers, a writer of novels that are at the smae time simple and profound, relentlessly gripping and deeply moving.

breath.timwinton.com.au

Let The Great World Spin

Winner of the 2009 National Book Award for Fiction.

In the dawning light of a late-summer morning, the people of lower Manhattan stand hushed, staring up in disbelief at the Twin Towers. It is August 1974, and a mysterious tightrope walker is running, dancing, leaping between the towers, suspended a quarter mile above the ground. In the streets below, a slew of ordinary lives become extraordinary in bestselling novelist Colum McCann's stunningly intricate portrait of a city and its people.

Let the Great World Spin is the critically acclaimed author's most ambitious novel yet: a dazzlingly rich vision of the pain, loveliness, mystery, and promise of New York City in the 1970s.

Corrigan, a radical young Irish monk, struggles with his own demons as he lives among the prostitutes in the middle of the burning Bronx. A group of mothers gather in a Park Avenue apartment to mourn their sons who died in Vietnam, only to discover just how much divides them even in grief. A young artist finds herself at the scene of a hit-and-run that sends her own life careening sideways. Tillie, a thirty-eight-year-old grandmother, turns tricks alongside her teenage daughter, determined not only to take care of her family but to prove her own worth.

Elegantly weaving together these and other seemingly disparate lives, McCann's powerful allegory comes alive in the unforgettable voices of the city's people, unexpectedly drawn together by hope, beauty, and the artistic crime of the century. A sweeping and radical social novel, Let the Great World Spin captures the spirit of America in a time of transition, extraordinary promise, and, in hindsight, heartbreaking innocence. Hailed as "a fiercely original talent" (San Francisco Chronicle), award-winning novelist McCann has delivered a triumphantly American masterpiece that awakens in us a sense of what the novel can achieve, confront, and even heal.

Things We Didn't See Coming

It’s the anxious eve of the millennium. The car is packed to capacity, and as midnight approaches, a family flees the city in a fit of panic and paranoid, conflicting emotions.

The ensuing journey spans decades and offers a sharp-eyed perspective on a hardscrabble future, as a boy jettisons his family and all other ties in order to survive as a journeyman in an uncertain landscape. By turns led by love, larceny, and a new sexual order, he must avoid capture and imprisonment, starvation, pandemic, and some particularly bad weather.

In Things We Didn’t See Coming, Steven Amsterdam links together nine luminous narratives through the mind of one peripatetic and resourceful wanderer who always has one eye on the exit door and the other on a future that shifts more drastically and more often than anyone would like to imagine.

"Something very strange happens upon finishing Steven Amsterdam's (remarkably assured and kind of masterful) stories: what should be a bum trip through a variety of dystopias – foodless worlds; heartless periods of ceaseless rain and savagery; breakouts of peace and plenty marked by venality and ambition; biblical pestilence and illness – ends up anything but; one puts down the book feeling something close to hope. Perhaps it's the life-is-long, cyclical wisdom of it all, maybe it's a new-found appreciation for the Here And Now, although I'm inclined to think it's just gratitude that there are such writers around." -David Rakoff

www.stevenamsterdam.com

Olive Kitteridge

Winner of the 2009 Pulitzer Prize for Fiction

At times stern, at other times patient, at times perceptive, at other times in sad denial, Olive Kitteridge, a retired schoolteacher, deplores the changes in her little town of Crosby, Maine, and in the world at large, but she doesn’t always recognize the changes in those around her: a lounge musician haunted by a past romance; a former student who has lost the will to live; Olive’s own adult child, who feels tyrannized by her irrational sensitivities; and her husband, Henry, who finds his loyalty to his marriage both a blessing and a curse.

As the townspeople grapple with their problems, mild and dire, Olive is brought to a deeper understanding of herself and her life–sometimes painfully, but always with ruthless honesty. Olive Kitteridge offers profound insights into the human condition–its conflicts, its tragedies and joys, and the endurance it requires.

Churchill and Australia

Winner of the 2009 Walkley Nonfiction Book Award.

Winston Churchill was a titan of the 20th century, universally acknowledged as one of the greatest leaders of his age. Yet his relationship with Australia was a troubled one, marred by conflict from the time Churchill was a junior minister in 1907 to bitter disputes over the use of Australian troops in the Second World War. The connection between the two would span the first 50 tumultuous years of the 20th century, from the Boer War through to opening salvos of the Cold War, and act as a fascinating backdrop to Australia's march from a collection of dependent colonies to full nationhood.

Home

Winner of the 2009 Orange Prize for Fiction.

Following on from the magnificent GILEAD, HOME takes up the story of the wayward son Jack who, after decades away, edgily and uneasily, but finally, returns home. He is the prodigal son and his family believe against all evidence , that if they love him enough, if they welcome him back, he will change and he will stay. But of course, that is not how life really goes… Marilynne Robinson’s understanding of the human heart, of how families operate, of how and why we continue to forgive and to hope, cuts right to the soul. She writes with wisdom, intelligence and generosity. She writes a masterpiece.

An Equal Stillness

Winner of the 2009 Orange Award for New Writing.

Born in 1924, Jennet Mallow grows up in Yorkshire, the daughter of a minister haunted by memories of war and a mother who craves the Blue Mountains of Jamaica. Entranced by the act of drawing from an early age, Jennet moves to London on a scholarship to art school and there, among the community of artists, she meets the handsome and enigmatic painter David Heaton. The two embark on a tempestuous relationship that leads them into marriage and parenthood. Aware that David is becoming increasingly reliant on drink and tired of the dank terraced house in which they live, Jennet agrees a move to the brighter skies of Spain. But, as her career flourishes, her relationship with David Sours and they enter a mutually destructive spiral with potentially tragic consequences.

Francesca Kay grew up in South-east Asia and India and has lived in Jamaica, the United States and Germany. She now lives in Oxford with her family. An Equal Stillness is her first book.

Man Gone Down

Winner of the 2009 International IMPAC Dublin Literary Award.

On the eve of his thirty-fifth birthday, the unnamed black narrator of Man Gone Down finds himself broke, estranged from his white wife and three children, and living in the bedroom of a friend's six-year-old child. He has four days to come up with the money to keep his kids in school and make a down payment on an apartment for them to live in. As we slip between his childhood in inner city Boston and present-day New York City, we discover a life marked by abuse, abandonment, raging alcoholism, and the best and worst intentions of a supposedly integrated America. This is a story of the American Dream gone awry, about what it's like to feel preprogrammed to fail in life and the urge to escape that sentence.

One of the Ten Best Books of the Year - The New York Times Book Review

'Vivid, graphic and poignant'
Washington Post

'Powerful and moving . . . An impressive success'
New York Times Book Review

'[A] jazzy, sinewy debut . . . Thomas's urgent, quicksilver prose makes even the darkest moments of this novel shine'
O' the Oprah Magazine

The Graveyard Book

Winner of the Newbery and Carnegie Medals 2009.

'It's going to take more than a couple of good-hearted souls to raise this child. It will,' said Silas, 'take a graveyard.'

An original adventure story about a boy raised by the resident ghosts, ghouls and spectres of a local graveyard. From the inimitable, bestselling author Neil Gaiman.

When a baby escapes a murderer intent on killing the entire family, who would have thought it would find safety and security in the local graveyard?

Bod has an eccentric childhood learning about life from the dead. But for Bod there is also the danger of the murderer still looking for him - after all, he is the last remaining member of the family.

A stunningly original novel deftly constructed over eight chapters, featuring every second year of Bod's life, from babyhood to adolescence. Will Bod survive to be a man?

'I wish my younger self could have had the opportunity to read and re-read this wonderful book, and my older self wishes that I had written it.' - Garth Nix

Harris Finds His Feet

Winner of the 2009 Kate Greenaway Medal

Harris was a very small hare with very big feet. "Why do I have such enormous feet, Grand dad?" Harris sighed . . . Grand dad shows Harris how to hop high into the sky, to climb to the tops of the mountains, and to run very fast. Harris not only learns about the world around him, but also the importance of finding his own feet.

Bog Child

Winner of the 2009 Carnegie Medal

Digging for peat in the mountain with his Uncle Tally, Fergus finds the body of a child, and it looks like she's been murdered. As Fergus tries to make sense of the mad world around him - his brother on hunger-strike in prison, his growing feelings for Cora, his parents arguing over the Troubles, and him in it up to the neck, blackmailed into acting as courier to God knows what, a little voice comes to him in his dreams, and the mystery of the bog child unfurls. Bog Child is an astonishing novel exploring the sacrifices made in the name of peace, and the unflinching strength of the human spirit.

Exposure

Winner of the 2090 Guardian Children's Fiction Prize.

The third Paul Faustino novel by multi-award-winning Mal Peet. A massive soccer star has it all, but someone is plotting his downfall... Revered as a national hero, married to the desirable Desmerelda, cherished by the media, soccer star, Otello, has it all. But a sensational club transfer sparks a media frenzy, and when he is wrongly implicated in a scandal, the footballer’s life turns into a tragic spiral of destruction. South America’s top sports journalist, Paul Faustino, witnesses the power of the media in making and breaking people's lives. -Mal Peet’s first Paul Faustino novel, Keeper, was winner of the 2004 Branford Boase Award and the 2004 Bronze Nestle Smarties Book Award. -A dramatic, topical novel inspired by Shakespeare's Othello which will appeal to both boys and girls with its themes of football and celebrity culture. Mal Peet is the author of the acclaimed young adult novels, Tamar, winner of the 2005 Carnegie Medal, and The Penalty, sequel to Keeper.

The Golden Bird: New And Selected Poems

Winner of the 2009 Victorian Premier's Literary C.J. Dennis Prize for Poetry

The Golden Bird brings together the best of Adamson’s work from the last four decades, and many superb new poems. An accessible introduction to Australia’s foremost lyric poet and an insight into the recurring themes that have shaped his remarkable body of work.

The Boat

Winner of the Prime Minister's Literary Award for Fiction 2009.

'The Boat raises the bar for Australian writing.'
PETER CRAVEN, Heat

'Nam Le is . . . a distributor of the peace.

'Consider the subjects of his stories: a child assassin in Colombia ('Cartagena'), an ageing New York artist desperate for a reconciliation with his daughter ('Meeting Elise'), a boy's coming of age in a rough Victorian fishing town ('Halflead Bay'), before the first atomic bomb falls in Japan ('Hiroshima'), The suffocations of theocracy in Iran ('Tehran Calling'). This astonishing range is topped and tailed by accounts of the uneasy reunion of a young Vietnamese writer in America with his ex-soldier father, and by the title story – the escape of a group of exhausted refugees from the Vietcong in a wallowing boat.

'One might be permitted to think, after all this high seriousness and intensity, Nam Le can't do funny. But this criminally talented 29-year-old can do that as well.'
BARRY OAKLEY, Australian Literary Review

'Stunning'
The Times

'A fearless new Australian voice that accepts no geographical limits: these are stories of leaping power and the most breath-taking grace and intimacy.'
HELEN GARNER

'Wonderful stories that snarl and pant across our crazed world . . . an extraordinary performance. Nam Le is a heartbreaker, not easily forgotten.'
JUNOT DIAZ

'The fiction debut of the year.'
JAMES LEY, Australian Book Review

'The best book debut of 2008.'
New York Magazine

'The runaway literary success of 2008.'
Weekend Australian

Perry Angel's Suitcase: Kingdom Of Silk Book 3

CBCA Younger Readers Book of the Year 2009

It has taken Perry Angel almost seven years to find the place where he belongs.

Perry arrives at the Kingdom of Silk one day on the 10.30 express, carrying only a small and shabby suitcase embossed with five golden letters. What do those letters mean? And why won t Perry let go of his case?

This is a gentle and moving story about finding your place in the world.

Perry Angel s Suitcase is the third book in the multi award-winning Kingdom of Silk series.The Naming of Tishkin Silk, the first book in the series, was short listed in the CBCA Book of the Year Awards and the for the NSW Premier's Literary Awards. Layla Queen of Hearts was short listed in the CBCA Book of the Year Awards and winner of the 2007 Queensland Premier's Literary Award.

Alive In The Death Zone

CBCA Eve Pownall Book of the Year 2009

Now in paperback, the inspiring story of a man who was left for dead on Mount Everest and survived.

ALIVE IN THE DEATH ZONE: Mount Everest Survival, Lincoln Hall's story of climbing the world's highest mountain, being left for dead near the summit and his subsequent return to life and safety, is an incredible and exciting adventure that will inspire anyone who reads it. It's a story of survival against all odds using sheer willpower, courage and determination.

Early chapters give young readers an insight into why people climb mountains, Lincoln's early interest in them and the influences that led to his passion for climbing and his quest to climb the world's highest peak. It will then focus on the 2006 expedition when Lincoln reached the summit but was left for dead because he suffered cerebral oedema when he began his descent. Miraculously, after spending a perilous night on a knife-edge crest in the Death Zone, he was found the next morning and began the descent, only to be confronted with more dangers before he reached safety. Unbeknown to Lincoln, the world, including his family, had been told he was dead, and the miraculous story of his survival made worldwide headline news. Frostbite claimed Lincoln's fingers and toes and he lost nearly twenty kilograms but his remarkable recovery and rehabilitation enabled him to write the best-selling book DEAD LUCKY.

Collecting Colour

CBCA Picture Book of the Year 2009

Collecting Colour tells the story of a day spent collecting colour in the Top End of the Northern Territory, narrated by a white Australian girl, Rose. Rose s best friend Olive s mother, Karrang, makes beautiful coloured baskets, mats and bags from leaves from the pandanus palm a tall, thin tree with very long, spiky leaves. Rose and Olive spend a day out bush helping to gather the pandanus leaves and stringy bark for making into strong bags and baskets. They collect the colour that the bags will be bright yellows and pinks, from special plants and berries. It is a hard day s work for Rose, but the results are worth it.

Collecting Colour, featuring stunning collage illustrations on Nepalese paper, is a feast for the senses and is also a fascinating insight into the way of life of fibre artists, who produce beautiful, original work in often difficult conditions

How To Heal A Broken Wing

CBCA Early Childhood Book of the Year 2009

In the busy city, no one sees the bird with a broken wing. No one, except a young boy named Will. With the help of his parents, Will takes the bird home to care for it. With rest, time, and a little hope, perhaps the bird will fly again.

Tales From Outer Suburbia

CBCA Older Readers Book of the Year 2009

Do you remember the water buffalo at the end of our street?

Or the deep-sea diver we found near the underpass?

Do you know why dogs bark in the middle of the night?

Shaun Tan, creator of The Arrival, The Lost Thing and The Red Tree, reveals the quiet mysteries of everyday life: homemade pets, dangerous weddings, stranded sea mammals, tiny exchange students and secret rooms filled with darkness and delight.

The Hunger Games

Winner of the 2009 Silver Inky Award for international teenage fiction.

Sixteen-year-old Katniss Everdeen regards it as a death sentence when she is forced to represent her district in the annual Hunger Games, a fight to the death on live TV. But Katniss has been close to death before - and survival, for her, is second nature. "The Hunger Games" is a searing novel set in a future with unsettling parallels to our present.

Where The Streets Had A Name

Winner of the 2009 Inky Award for Australian teenage fiction.

I need to see Sitti Zeynab one last time. To know if I will have the courage to go ahead with my plan. The two nurses look frazzled and smile wearily at me. 'We must leave now,' they say in urgent tones. 'I won't be long,' I reassure them and I jump up onto the back of the ambulance. I can smell the air of her village, pure and scented. I can see her village as though it were Bethlehem itself. I can smell the almond trees. Hear my heels click on the courtyard tiles. See myself jumping two steps at a time down the limestone stairs. I can see Sitti Zeynab sitting in the front porch of the house. I only have to remember that walk through her memories and I know I can make my promise. I've already lost once. I refuse to lose again. 'Stay alive,' I whisper. 'And you shall touch that soil again.'