Readings.com.au: Miles Franklin Shortlist 2008

The Time We Have Taken

Winner of the 2008 Miles Franklin Literary Award.

That exotic tribe was us. And the time we have taken, our moment.'

One summer morning in 1970, Peter van Rijn, proprietor of the television and wireless shop, pronounces his Melbourne suburb one hundred years old.

That same morning, Rita is awakened by a dream of her husband's snores, yet it is years since Vic moved north. Their son, Michael, has left for the city, and is entering the awkward terrain of first love.

As the suburb prepares to celebrate progress, Michael's friend Mulligan is commissioned to paint a mural of the area's history. But what vision of the past will his painting reveal?

Meanwhile, Rita's sometime friend Mrs Webster confronts the mystery of her husband's death. And Michael discovers that innocence can only be sustained for so long.

The Time We Have Taken is both a meditation on the rhythms of suburban life and a luminous exploration of public and private reckoning during a time of radical change.

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

The Fern Tattoo

Ten years after his mother’s death in an accident on the Hume Highway near Canberra, Benedict Waters is contacted by Mrs Darling, who claims to be an old friend of his mother’s. Several years later, he at last agrees to meet her, and she tells him that she has things of his mother’s to pass onto him. Only when Mrs Darling dies a few years later does Benedict uncover, in her possessions, a hidden world of family secrets he knew nothing about. Through his mother’s diaries, he learns of family scandals and crimes that have played out over the course of the previous century, the consequences of which haunt his family still. Meticulously plotted, The Fern Tattoo carefully unveils a story of the inescapable burden of ancestry and family heritage.

Sorry

In the remote outback of Western Australia during World War II, English anthropologist Nicholas Keene and his wife, Stella, raise a lonely child, Perdita. Her upbringing is far from ordinary: in a shack in the wilderness, with a distant father burying himself in books and an unstable mother whose knowledge of Shakespeare forms the backbone of the girl's limited education.

Emotionally adrift, Perdita becomes friends with a deaf and mute boy, Billy, and an Aboriginal girl, Mary. Perdita and Mary come to call one another sister and to share a very special bond. They are content with life in this remote corner of the globe, until a terrible event lays waste to their lives.

Through this exquisite story of Perdita's troubled childhood, Gail Jones explores the values of friendship, loyalty and sacrifice with a brilliance that has already earned her numerous accolades for her previous novels, Dreams of Speaking and Sixty Lights.