Readings.com.au: The Age Book of the Year Shortlist 2008 Fiction

Orphan Gunner

A romance between two young Australian women, set in Bomber Command in Lincolnshire during the Second World War. Evelyn has escaped to England to become one of the few female pilots with the Air Transport Auxiliary. Journeying from Australia, her friend Olive enlists in the WAAF. A growing intimacy develops between them.

The Orphan Gunner explores the seductions of passing, the licence granted by risk, and the selflessness - and selfishness - of sacrifice. The relationship between the two women is portrayed with subtlety and warmth, and an extraordinary sense of historical detail which brings its wartime setting vividly to life.

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 is about loneliness, friendship and the possibility of love. It 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; enthralling, unexpected and deeply moving; Diary of a Bad Year may be the most original work of fiction to appear this year.

Breath

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

The Good Parents

Maya de Jong, an eighteen-year-old country girl from the West, comes to live in Melbourne and starts an affair with her boss, the enigmatic Maynard Flynn, whose wife is dying of cancer. When Maya's parents, Toni and Jacob, arrive to stay with her, they are told by her housemate that Maya has gone away and no one knows where she is. As Toni and Jacob wait and search for Maya in Melbourne, everything in their lives is brought into question. They recall the yearning and dreams, the betrayals and choices of their pasts - choices with unexpected and irrevocable consequences. With Maya's disappearance, the lives of all those close to her come into focus, to reveal the complexity of the ties that bind us to one another, to parents, children, siblings, friends and lovers. Pacy and enthralling, The Good Parents is at once a vision of contemporary Australia and a story as old as fairytales: that of a runaway girl.

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.