Readings.com.au: The Age Book of the Year Shortlist 2009 Fiction

Cooee

Isabel Weaving, is not quite who she seems. True, she’s a daughter, a sister, a mother and an ex-wife, having escaped one unsatisfactory marriage, although not with her relationships with her children intact. Her second husband, Max, is the love of her life but is no longer around, the grief caused by his absence only tempered by the visits of her beloved granddaughter. Gradually and unwittingly, Isabel reveals more and more about herself, her relationships and Max’s disappearance.

This dark and elegant literary mystery will have you gasping at its unexpected revelations, but also doubled over at Isabel’s blackly comic wit.

Butterfly

Here is Plum Coyle, on the threshold of adolescence, striving to be new. Her fourteenth birthday is approaching: her old life and her old body will fall away, and she will become graceful, powerful, at ease. The strength in the objects she stores in a briefcase under her bed - a crystal lamb, a yoyo, an antique watch, a penny - will make sure of it.

Over the next couple of weeks, Plum's life will change. Her beautiful neighbour Maureen will begin to show her how she might fly. The older brothers she adores - the charismatic Justin, the enigmatic Cydar - will court catastrophe in worlds that she barely knows exist. And her friends - her worst enemies - will tease and test, smelling weakness. They will try to lead her on and take her down.

Who ever forgets what happens when you're fourteen?

Butterfly is a gripping, disquieting, beautifully observed novel that confirms Hartnett as one of Australia's finest writers.

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

Look Who's Morphing

This is a collection of brilliant stories about transformation, with the storyteller and his family shifting through identities drawn from comics, video games, daytime TV, porn flicks and movies, in fantasies of sexual and physical power which reach their (literal) climax with one final morph, into a fifty-foot tall ‘cock rock’ hero with a striking resemblance to Lemuel Gulliver. Influenced by the young adult book series Sweet Valley High, Tom Cho began writing fiction in his mid-teens, and has published widely in zines, blogs and literary journals. This is his much anticipated first collection.