Tag: 2020 Miles Franklin Literary Award

20 books of summer, 20 books of summer (2020), 2020 Miles Franklin, 2020 Stella Prize, Australia, Australian Women Writers Challenge, Author, AWW2020, Book review, Fiction, Hamish Hamilton, literary fiction, Literary prizes, Publisher, Setting, Tara June Winch

‘The Yield’ by Tara June Winch

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Fiction – paperback; Hamish Hamilton; 344 pages; 2019.

If you live in Australia, you would probably have to be living under a rock not to know this novel by Wiradjuri author Tara June Winch. The Yield won this year’s Miles Franklin Literary Award, arguably this country’s greatest literary prize, as well as the Christina Stead Prize for Fiction at the NSW Premier’s Literary Awards. It has been shortlisted for numerous others, including the Stella Prize and the Victorian Premier’s Literary Awards.

It tells the story of August, a young Aboriginal woman, who returns home — after a decade living in London — to help bury her beloved grandfather, Albert ‘Poppy’ Gondiwindi. Poppy was midway through writing a dictionary of his people’s language, but his work has gone missing and August is intent on finding it so that she can finish the task at hand. But back on country, August discovers there are bigger challenges ahead: her grandparents’ house is about to be repossessed by a mining company.

It’s a multi-layered, multi-generational story that revolves around grief, loss and dispossession, but teases out, gently but oh-so surely, what it is to be Aboriginal, to have a sense of identity, a true purpose and a language of one’s own.

I read this rather extraordinary novel earlier this year (as part of my #20BooksOfSummer challenge), but never got around to reviewing it mainly because I couldn’t find the words to do it justice. Since then, I have seen numerous other positive reviews online — Lisa’s from ANZLitLovers, Sue’s from Whispering Gums, Kate’s at Booksaremyfavouriteandbest, and Brona’s at Brona’s Books — all of which are excellent summations of a truly excellent book.

Rather than repeat what others have said, I thought I would quickly describe three things I loved about this award-winning novel so that you get a flavour of what to expect.

1.The Structure

The book has three main narrative threads, which are told in alternate chapters: the first is August’s tale, told in the third-person, covering her homecoming and the pain and anguish she feels upon Poppy’s death, an event that triggers traumatic memories associated with the disappearance of her sister, Jedda, years earlier; the second is comprised purely of extracts from Poppy’s dictionary (more on this later) written in a conversational first-person voice; while the third is a handful of letters written in the early part of the 20th century by Reverend Ferdinand Greenleaf, a German national who established and ran the mission (upon which the Goondawindi family live) in 1880.

This trio of storylines gives us different perspectives — spanning more than a century — on identity and the Aboriginal “problem”.

2.The Dictionary

Poppy’s dictionary, based on the language of the Wiradjuri people, is completely fascinating for anyone who loves words and language. Each entry reads like the sort of entry you’d expect to see in an established English dictionary, such as the Oxford or Macquarie, with the word bolded up and translated into English.

But the definition is written in a conversationalist tone, with Poppy telling a tale from his past revolving around that word. Through these dictionary entries, he is able to share his life story and the importance of culture and language to his being.

sap of trees — ‘dhalbu’ The dhalbu of the bloodwood tree saved some of the Gondiwindi. When we were being gathered up to be taken away and taught the Bible and be trained as labourers and domestic servants, my great aunties were frightened and ran. Tried to hide their light-skinned babies in the bush. Some did get away and were never seen again. And some couldn’t leave in time and disguised their babies as full-blood by painting them dark with the dhalbu. Some of them were later captured. They wander around the river that appears when I travel with the ancestors, blood and sap soaked, hiding in plain sight now but still frightened.

3.The immersive nature of the story

This probably sounds a bit vague, but reading this novel was a truly immersive experience in a way I have rarely known. It’s like a bit of “magic” happened inside my brain as I read it, because somewhere in my mind I was able to triangulate the three storylines to build up an almost complete picture of not only what had happened to the Gondiwindi family over a century of struggle and dispossession, but I could see how it had come about and how resilient these people had become.

I was able to see how the Reverend’s aims, so easily written off as racist when viewed through modern eyes, came from an essentially good, if seriously misguided, place; I could feel inspired by the ever-optimistic Poppy, who had defied everything that had been thrown at him because of the colour of his skin to lead a fulfilling life full of meaning and harbouring next to no bitterness; and I could empathise with August, who ran away from all she knew because that was the only way she could handle a personal tragedy.

For all these reasons, The Yield really is a triumph of storytelling. I particularly loved and admired the ambition of it.

The cover of the UK / USA edition

The Yield has already been published in the USA; it will be published in the UK next January.

This is my 16th book for #AWW2020 and my 14h book for #20BooksofSummer / #20BooksOfSouthernHemisphereWinter. I purchased it from my local indie book shop not long after it was first published last year. I hadn’t really heard much about it at the time; I was mainly attracted to the pretty cover adorned with pictures of brolgas. Shallow? Moi? Never!

2020 Miles Franklin, Literary prizes, Tara June Winch

Tara June Winch wins the 2020 Miles Franklin Literary Award

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Congratulations to Australian writer and Wiradjuri author Tara June Winch who was named winner of the 2020 Miles Franklin Literary Award for her novel The Yield earlier today.

The $60,000 annual prize is designed to recognise a novel of “the highest literary merit” that presents “Australian life in any of its phases”. Winch is the second indigenous writer in a row to win the award, following last year’s winner Melissa Lucashenko for Too Much Lip.

This how the chair of the judging panel, Richard Neville, described the winning book:

 “In English ‘yield’ signifies what one takes from the land. In Wiradjuri it is ‘the things you give to, the movement, the space between things: baayanha.’ The Yield explores the legacies of colonial violence, shame, intergenerational trauma and environmental destruction. Winch celebrates and amplifies the contemporary resurgence and relevance of the Wiradjuri language. The Yield, a story of pain, loss, resilience and hope, is a novel where the past is the present is the future.”

Typically, I haven’t read The Yield, although I bought it not long after publication last year. I started it on the weekend and from the first couple of pages I just knew I was going to love it. The prose style, the ideas and themes, and the structure all appeal to me. Stay tuned for a review coming soon.

You can read more about today’s announcement on the official website.

And you can see a list of the shortlisted titles I have read here.

2020 Miles Franklin, Australia, Author, Book review, Fiction, literary fiction, Literary prizes, Publisher, Setting, Transit Lounge

‘The Returns’ by Philip Salom

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Fiction – Kindle edition; Transit Lounge; 336 pages; 2019.

Philip Salom’s The Returns is about two middle-aged people in inner-city Melbourne who become housemates and develop an unlikely friendship. It has been shortlisted for this year’s Miles Franklin Literary Award.

It has everything I could wish for in a literary novel. Eccentric, middle-aged characters with unusual backstories. Geat dialogue and wry, understated jokes. A bookshop setting. A character who is an editor. Another who is a would-be artist. Lots of mentions of food and cooking. References to things — books, films and places — that I know well.

And yet something about this novel just did not gel for me. I struggled to connect with the story.

New beginnings

The Returns revolves around two people whose lives have not panned out the way they might have expected. Both have successfully reinvented themselves after career setbacks, but neither is truly happy.

Elizabeth is a freelance book editor who divides her time between her work in Melbourne and looking after her aged mother in Ballarat. She has an adult daughter she very rarely sees. Most of her spare time is spent obsessing over her diet and what she puts in her mouth. She has prosopagnosia, which means she is  incapable of remembering and recognising people by their faces.

Trevor is a bookshop owner with a penchant for cooking who once longed to be an artist. He survived a nasty car accident and now walks with a limp. His marriage has run its natural course but he is still living with his wife, albeit in separate bedrooms. He is effectively stuck in a rut, going to work every day, dealing with difficult customers, then coming home to cook dinner for his ex-wife.

The pair meet when Elizabeth collapses near Trevor’s bookshop. Her unhealthy obsession with healthy eating means her blood sugar is dangerously low. Trevor rescues her, and later she returns to ask him to put an advertisement in his shop window. She has a spare room in her house she wants to rent out.

Trevor recognises this as an opportunity to move out of the marital home and start afresh. The added bonus is that Elizabeth has a shed in her back garden which would be perfect to use as an art studio, giving him the chance to rekindle his thwarted artistic career. And so Trevor becomes Elizabeth’s lodger.

Getting to know each other

Not much happens plotwise in The Returns. Much of it revolves around two characters getting to know one another, the uneasy tension giving way to trust and friendship. Salom takes his time to flesh this out, using wry humour, well-versed conversations and detailed set pieces to show how each character becomes acquainted with the other.

Their individual perspectives are told in alternate “chunks”, for want of a better word (there are no chapters in this novel), so that the reader gets to know both characters incredibly well.

On the face of it, it would seem neither has much in common. But they are both “the offspring of Narcissists”, as Trevor puts it. His Polish-born father went missing when Trevor was a child and despite been declared legally dead has recently reappeared on the scene making unreasonable demands, while Elizabeth’s mother belonged to the Rajneesh movement, otherwise known as the Orange People, and failed to protect her teenage daughter from the sexual deviants within its midst. Both Trevor and Elizabeth, it would seem, are still grappling with the psychological wounds of their upbringings.

Similarly, they both have an obsession with food — Trevor for cooking it, Elizabeth with being Over The Top about its provenance and nutritional content — and the power of art and literature to transform and giving meaning to their lives.

I particularly loved the little asides about literature, such as this one:

Trevor is standing beside a man who is a big fan of Irish fiction and especially of Dermot Healy and the new star Eimear McBride. ‘A man of good taste,’ says Trevor. They have been discussing linguistic tangles and how and when or if they are appropriate in the novel and how this book by McBride was thrown aside by umpteen publishers, umpteen meaning for nine years, before it was finally taken, sold and immediately made her famous. A very French outcome for an Irish book.

And yet, for all the richly detailed prose and the total immersion in two character’s slowly intertwined lives, I struggled to fully connect with The Returns. Perhaps it was just too slow-moving for me and lacked sufficient drama to make me want to keep turning the pages. Or maybe it was the right book but the wrong time?

Lisa at ANZ LitLovers liked this much more than me.

This my 6th book for the 2020 Miles Franklin Literary Award.

20 books of summer, 20 books of summer (2020), 2020 Miles Franklin, Australia, Author, Book review, Fiction, John Hughes, literary fiction, Literary prizes, Publisher, Setting, University of Western Australia Press

‘No One’ by John Hughes

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Fiction – paperback; UWA Publishing; 158 pages; 2019.

John Hughes’ No One is a beguiling novel about ghosts, memory and identity. It has been shortlisted for this year’s Miles Franklin Literary Award.

One man’s quest to ease his conscience

Set in inner Sydney, it tells the story of one man’s quest to discover the person he believes he may have hit in his car driving home in the early hours of the morning. The only problem is, he didn’t see what he hit, he simply felt a “dull thud, like a roo hitting the side of the car” and later noticed the damage to his beaten-up old Volvo station wagon — a dent on the passenger side near the front bumper.

I looked again at the depression in the front panel. It seemed larger now, and higher on the body. A dog could not have made such a dint, I thought, or only a dog as large as a man or a roo. What I did then I can’t account for. For some reason I looked up, as if I felt I was being watched, though I knew there was no one there. I’ve come to think that everything that followed can be traced back to that sensation, though if someone were to ask me what it was, I would be at a loss to explain. I often feel in any case that language is really no more than a banging of our head against a wall.

Haunted by what he may have done, he returns to the scene of the “crime” near Redfern Sation but cannot find anyone injured nearby. He visits a local hospital to see if any hit-and-run victims have been admitted. His search proves futile.

A crime without a victim

At its most basic level, No One is simply a mystery without a resolution. It’s not even clear whether a crime has been committed — there’s certainly no victim unless we consider that the man himself is the victim of his own paranoia and sense of guilt.

But scratch the surface and there’s a whole lot more going on within this slim novel, so much so that something I thought would take me a few hours to read took a week or more. I wanted to savour the story, to reflect on certain episodes within it, and to enjoy Hughes’ hypnotic prose style and his metaphor-filled narrative.

I particularly admired his playfulness with the themes of memory and time and the strange ways in which our brains process events, and I was occasionally reminded of Gerald Murnane’s work, which often explores similar issues.

A traumatic childhood

Much of the story focuses on the man’s upbringing. A child of Turkish immigrants who abandoned him, he was raised in five different foster homes in various wild and remote places of Australia. These experiences shaped his outlook on life, his separateness from Australian-Anglo culture in general, and his inability to “escape his childhood”.

A transient as an adult, he has lived in a series of boarding houses and prefers those on the outskirts, rather than the city, because it’s quieter and “the sky seems wider and there are paddocks and areas that feel unused”.

He discovers a sense of home when he hooks up with an Aboriginal woman, whom he dubs The Poetess. She helps him on his quest to find the missing victim of his crime, but that, too, proves futile, and their relationship, cemented by mutual loneliness, is put to the test when her violent ex-partner, responsible for her scar-ravaged face, arrives on the scene.

When a shocking real crime is committed, it feels almost as chimeric as the ghostly one that has frustrated the man from the beginning. And while I personally didn’t think this climax was needed to make the story work, it makes an unarguable point: that violence, whether seen or unseen, is often the common thread that binds minorities, whether they be women, immigrants, orphans or indigenous Australians.

There’s much more to unpack in this novel, and I suspect different readers will gain different insights from it. Rich in language, in metaphor and allegories, and told in an episodic, languid and dreamlike fashion, No One is about alienation, belonging and Australian identity.

This is my 5th for the 2020 Miles Franklin Literary Award and my 4th novel for #20BooksofSummer / #20BooksOfSouthernHemisphereWinter. I bought it not long after it was longlisted for the 2020 Miles Franklin Literary Award. It was published by University of Western Australia Publishing, which is a 15-minute drive down the road, so it feels local even though the story is set largely on the other side of the country and the author resides in NSW.

2020 Miles Franklin, Literary prizes

The 2020 Miles Franklin Literary Award shortlist

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At last, I appear to be on the right side of the world to hear today’s announcement: who made it on to this year’s shortlist for the Miles Franklin Literary Award.

The nominees are:

As you can see I have already read a couple. I read No One on the weekend (it’s excellent), so plan on reviewing that very soon. The rest, bar Islands, are already on my TBR, so I hope to review them in due course before the prize announcement. Do keep coming back to this post as I will update the hyperlinks above as and when I review each title.

The winner of the $60,000 prize will be named on 16 July.

You can read the official press release here. And read what the Sydney Morning Herald have to say about it here.

2020 Miles Franklin, Australia, Australian Women Writers Challenge, Author, AWW2020, Book review, Carrie Tiffany, Fiction, literary fiction, Literary prizes, Publisher, Reading Projects

‘Exploded View’ by Carrie Tiffany

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Fiction – paperback; Text; 183 pages; 2019.

Carrie Tiffany’s third novel, Exploded View, is a strangely hypnotic story about a teenage girl in the 1970s plotting to get the better of the man who has become her stepfather.

At its most base level, it is a tale of child sexual abuse, albeit done in a subtle, nuanced way (many of the references are elliptical rather than direct), but it’s also a powerful tale of a teenager taking control of her life in the only way she feels is open to her: by sabotaging the car engines her “man father” works on for a living.

It is a book ripe with metaphors and euphemisms. Cars and their mechanical workings feature heavily. The girl’s “man father” runs an unlicensed automotive workshop at the back of the house and she’s often called upon to help out.

Small acts of defiance

In the evenings, she climbs out her bedroom window and tinkers with the engines, removing hidden screws or putting grit in places it shouldn’t go, in the hope this will ruin her man father’s reputation. She even takes various cars on evening joy rides, pushing the vehicles out of hearing distance before turning the key. On weekdays she breaks into a neighbour’s house and makes herself at home, often eating the “fat lady’s” food or watching her TV. It’s hard not to see these acts of defiance as a call for help,.

The girl knows a lot about engines and studies Scientific Publications Holden Workshop Manual Series No. 15, which is secretly hidden under her bed. It is the exploded view diagrams, those that show the spaces between the parts and how they fit together, that she likes best.

It’s hard not to read the descriptions of the way engine parts slide together and move about as thinly disguised euphemisms for sexual acts. Even the bits that explain how to take things apart appear to mirror the pain and hurt that the girl is so carefully disguising.

Any engine can be stripped down and reassembled if you know how. When a human body is taken apart there’s no way it can ever be put back together again.

But for all her acts of defiance, the girl is introverted and quiet, she remains mute for 60 days and watches TV shows — Mash, Matlock, Get Smart, The Brady Bunch et al — to figure out how a girl should act.

She should be cautious, but a girl should not be silent. She should have a voice that tinkles like a bell. Words are made in the head and sent down to the throat for speaking. It happens instantly. Except when a part is broken and the words go around and around inside instead. If they ever found their way out who knows what mess they would make?

A story in three parts

The novel is structured in three parts, one of which describes an agonisingly long road trip — “Eight days in the car. Three days in the house of father man’s friend. Eight days home again” — from the west coast of Australia to the east coast. It is during this journey that the girl feels safe, no doubt because there is never any alone time with her father man; her mother and her brother are always in the car with them.

This trip, detailed in delicious vignettes, is rich with feeling — of claustrophobia, of frustration, of fear — and is littered with descriptions of death — of roadkill, of foxes hung up on fences, of road traffic accidents — but there are also some moments of joy and humour.

When a mother needs to go to the toilet a place has to be found with trees and bushes and everyone has to stay in the car and pretend it isn’t happening. The mother walks in a long way through the bushes, placing her feet carefully between the clumps of grass in case of snakes. It takes a long time. Once, when my mother barely had her legs back in the car, father man drove off because he could see a caravan coming up from behind.

The story culminates in a not unexpected tragedy, highlighting how crimes of trespass — whether human or otherwise — can have long-lasting, devastating consequences.

Exploded View has been nominated for numerous awards, including the Christina Stead Prize for Fiction at the 2020 NSW Premier’s Literary Awards; the 2019 NIB Waverley Literary Award; the 2020 Booktopia Favourite Australian Book; Literary Fiction Book of the Year at the 2020 Australian Book Industry Awards; the 2020 Miles Franklin Literary Award; and the 2020 Australian Literature Society Gold Medal. It won The University of Queensland Fiction Book Award at the Queensland Literary Awards last year.

Please note, it does not appear to be available outside of Australia but it can be ordered direct from the publisher for a flat overseas shipping fee.

This is my 8th book for #AWW2020, my 4th for the 2020 Miles Franklin Literary Award and my 18th book for #TBR2020 in which I plan to read 20 books from my TBR between 1 January and 30 June. I bought my copy secondhand last September.

2020 Miles Franklin

The 2020 Miles Franklin Literary Award longlist

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If you follow me on Twitter, you will know that the Miles Franklin Literary Award was on my mind at the start of the month.

Imagine my surprise today to discover the longlist had been unexpectedly dropped via the Miles Franklin Instagram account. (See here.) Of course, I then visited Lisa Hill’s blog to check whether she had any additional news (and to see how many books she had read) and read the official announcement on Perpetual’s website.

There are 10 books on the list and I’ve read three. I have a handful more on my TBR. I’m not sure I will read all the books on the longlist, but will wait for the shortlist to be announced on 17 June and try to read everything on that.

The winner of the $60,0000 prize will be announced on 16 July 2020.

Below is a list of the books, in alphabetical order by author name, with the publisher’s synopsis underneath. Hyperlinks will take you to my reviews.

The White Girl by Tony Birch
“Odette Brown has lived her whole life on the fringes of a small country town. After her daughter disappeared and left her with her granddaughter Sissy to raise on her own, Odette has managed to stay under the radar of the welfare authorities who are removing fair-skinned Aboriginal children from their families.”

Room for a Stranger by Melanie Cheng
“Since her sister died, Meg has been on her own. She doesn’t mind, not really—not with Atticus, her African grey parrot, to keep her company—but after her house is broken into by a knife-wielding intruder, she decides it might be good to have some company after all. Andy’s father has lost his job, and his parents’ savings are barely enough to cover his tuition. If he wants to graduate, he’ll have to give up his student flat and find a homeshare. Living with an elderly Australian woman is harder than he’d expected, though, and soon he’s struggling with more than his studies.”

Islands by Peggy Frew
“Helen and John are too preoccupied with making a mess of their marriage to notice the quiet ways in which their daughters are suffering. Junie grows up brittle and defensive, Anna difficult and rebellious. When fifteen-year-old Anna fails to come home one night, her mother’s not too worried; Anna’s taken off before but always returned. Helen waits three days to report her disappearance. But this time Anna doesn’t come back …”

No One by John Hughes
“In the ghost hours of a Monday morning a man feels a dull thud against the side of his car near the entrance to Redfern Station. He doesn’t stop immediately. By the time he returns to the scene, the road is empty, but there is a dent in the car, high up on the passenger door, and what looks like blood. Only a man could have made such a dent, he thinks. For some reason he looks up, though he knows no one is there. Has he hit someone, and if so, where is the victim? So begins a story that takes us to the heart of contemporary Australia’s festering relationship to its indigenous past. A story about guilt for acts which precede us, crimes we are not sure we have committed, crimes gone on so long they now seem criminal- less.”

Act of Grace by Anna Krien
“Iraqi aspiring pianist Nasim falls from favour with Saddam Hussein and his psychopathic son, triggering a perilous search for safety. In Australia, decades later, Gerry is in fear of his tyrannical father, Toohey, who has returned from the Iraq War bearing the physical and psychological scars of conflict. Meanwhile, Robbie is dealing with her own father’s dementia when the past enters the present. These characters’ worlds intertwine in a brilliant narrative of guilt and reckoning, trauma and survival. Crossing the frontiers of war, protest and reconciliation, Act of Grace is a meditation on inheritance: the damage that one generation passes on to the next, and the potential for transformation.”

A Season on Earth by Gerald Murnane
“Lost to the world for more than four decades, A Season on Earth is the essential link between two acknowledged masterpieces by Gerald Murnane: the lyrical account of boyhood in his debut novel, Tamarisk Row, and the revolutionary prose of The Plains. A Season on Earth is Murnane’s second novel as it was intended to be, bringing together all of its four sections – the first two of which were published as A Lifetime on Clouds in 1976 and the last two of which have never been in print. A hilarious tale of a lustful teenager in 1950s Melbourne, A Lifetime on Clouds has been considered an outlier in Murnane’s fiction. That is because, as Murnane writes in his foreword, it is ‘only half a book and Adrian Sherd only half a character.’ Here, at last, is sixteen-year-old Adrian’s journey in full, from fantasies about orgies with American film stars and idealised visions of suburban marital bliss to his struggles as a Catholic novice, and finally a burgeoning sense of the boundless imaginative possibilities to be found in literature and landscapes. Adrian Sherd is one of the great comic creations in Australian writing, and A Season on Earth is a revelatory portrait of the artist as a young man.”

The Returns by Philip Salom
“Elizabeth posts a ‘room for rent’ notice in Trevor’s bookshop and is caught off-guard when Trevor answers the advertisement himself. She expected a young student, not a middle-aged bookseller whose marriage has fallen apart. But Trevor is attracted to Elizabeth’s house because of the empty shed in her backyard, the perfect space for him to revive the artistic career he abandoned years earlier. The face-blind, EH Holden-driving Elizabeth is a solitary and feisty book editor, and she accepts him, on probation … In this poignant yet upbeat novel, the past keeps returning in the most unexpected ways. Elizabeth is at the beck and call of her ageing mother, and the associated memories of her childhood in a Rajneesh community. Trevor’s Polish father disappeared when Trevor was fifteen, and his mother died not knowing whether he was dead or alive. The authorities have declared him dead, but is he?”

Exploded View by Carrie Tiffany
“In the late 1970s, in the forgotten outer suburbs, a girl has her hands in the engine of a Holden. A sinister new man has joined the family. He works as a mechanic and operates an unlicensed repair shop at the back of their block. The family is under threat. The girl reads the Holden workshop manual for guidance. She resists the man with silence, then with sabotage. She fights him at the place where she believes his heart lives – in the engine of the car.”

The Yield by Tara June Winch
“Knowing that he will soon die, Albert ‘Poppy’ Gondiwindi takes pen to paper. His life has been spent on the banks of the Murrumby River at Prosperous House, on Massacre Plains. Albert is determined to pass on the language of his people and everything that was ever remembered. He finds the words on the wind. August Gondiwindi has been living on the other side of the world for ten years when she learns of her grandfather’s death. She returns home for his burial, wracked with grief and burdened with all she tried to leave behind. Her homecoming is bittersweet as she confronts the love of her kin and news that Prosperous is to be repossessed by a mining company. Determined to make amends she endeavours to save their land – a quest that leads her to the voice of her grandfather and into the past, the stories of her people, the secrets of the river.”

The Weekend by Charlotte Wood
“Four older women have a lifelong friendship of the best kind: loving, practical, frank and steadfast. But when Sylvie dies, the ground shifts dangerously for the remaining three. Can they survive together without her? They are Jude, a once-famous restaurateur, Wendy, an acclaimed public intellectual, and Adele, a renowned actress now mostly out of work. Struggling to recall exactly why they’ve remained close all these years, the grieving women gather for Christmas at Sylvie’s old beach house – not for festivities, but to clean the place out before it is sold. Without Sylvie to maintain the group’s delicate equilibrium, frustrations build and painful memories press in. Fraying tempers, an elderly dog, unwelcome guests and too much wine collide in a storm that brings long-buried hurts to the surface – and threatens to sweep away their friendship for good.”

I reckon this is a really interesting list — there are only two new names to me (John Hughes and Philip Salom) — with a mix of men and women and diverse subject matter. I’m looking forward to reading the books already on my TBR. Have you read any of these books? Or have any piqued your interest?