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You are here:  Arts and Culture > Books > 2009 Prime Minister's Literary Awards > 2009 shortlists

Watch excerpts from the 2009 shortlist announcement

Non-Fiction

Van Diemen's Land

About the book

Almost half of the convicts who came to Australia came to Van Diemen's Land. There they found a land of bounty and a penal society, a kangaroo economy and a new way of life. In Van Diemen's Land, James Boyce shows how the convicts were changed by the natural world they encountered. Escaping authority, they soon settled away from the towns, dressing in kangaroo-skin and living off the land. Behind the official attempt to create a Little England was another story of adaptation, in which the poor, the exiled and the criminal made a new home in a strange land. This is their story, the story of Van Diemen'sLand. (Black Inc.)

About the author

James Boyce is the author of Van Diemen's Land, of which Richard Flanagan has said ‘The most significant colonial history since The Fatal Shore. In re-imaging Australia's past, it invents a new future’. Tim Flannery describes it as ‘A brilliant book and a must-read for anyone interested in how land shapes people’.

Van Diemen's Land won the 2009 Tasmania Book Prize and was shortlisted in the Australian Book Industry Awards, The Age Book of the Year Awards, the Victorian Premier's Literary Awards, the Queensland Premier's Literary Awards, NSW Premier's History Awards and the Colin Roderick Award.

James Boyce's essay Fantasy Island was the central contribution to Whitewash: On Keith Windschuttle's Fabrication of Aboriginal History (edited by Robert Manne) and was shortlisted for the Alfred Deakin Prize for an Essay Advancing Public Debate in the Victorian Premier's Literary Awards in 2004. He also wrote the Tasmania chapter for First Australians, the companion book to the SBS TV series. He is an honorary research associate at the University of Tasmania's Centre for Environmental Studies.

Judges' comments

With the arrival of three parties of troops and convicts—two from NSW and one from London—white settlement was established in the north and south of Van Diemen's Land in 1803. After a brief period of co-existence between the invaders and the Indigenous people the dynamics changed dramatically as convict stockmen helped create a pastoral industry by following the kangaroo hunters into the landscape of lush grasslands nurtured by thousands of years of land management by Tasmania's Aborigines. James Boyce tells an increasingly tragic story with immense skill, adding considerable depth to our understanding.

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Doing Life: A Biography of Elizabeth Jolley

About the book

Elizabeth Jolley wrote about hope and love in families, schools, hospitals, nursing homes and boarding houses in which unlovely and loveless people survive as best they can. Jolley too was a survivor. Her lovelorn and homeless times in Britain and her life as a migrant in Australia inform her own experiences of 'doing life'. The many prizes, awards and academic and civil honours Jolley received reflect her importance as an author who helped to define Australia's identity during the late part of the twentieth century.

Brian Dibble was given complete access to the writer's private papers and has spent more than a decade travelling the world to follow leads on the story of Elizabeth Jolley. Through his meticulous research and elegant prose, he details the life of the woman and captures the importance of the writer. This is a lyrical and readable biography, one that presents a world of family and pleasures, but is always infused somewhere with an unexpended sadness. (UWA Press)

About the author

Brian Dibble who in 1972 founded what is now Communication and Cultural Studies at Curtin University, is Curtin's Emeritus Professor of Comparative Literature. Aside from his recently published biography of Elizabeth Jolley—Doing Life—Brian has published many articles on Elizabeth Jolley's work and written/edited a dozen books, including his own poetry and prose and two edited volumes of William Hart-Smith's poetry. Brian has also judged the WA Premier's Book Awards, was the foundation president of the International PEN Perth Centre in 1985 and co-founded the Australian Association of Writing Programs in 1996.

Judges' comments

After many a lonely year writing at night on her legendary kitchen table, Elizabeth Jolley suddenly found herself famous in her 50s. With readers fascinated by her portraits of people on the margins the prizes piled up—yet the writer remained a mystery. Now, after a decade's international research and access to her papers, Brian Dibble tells us Jolley's story—and reveals the links between her marvellous gallery of misfits and the writer.

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Gough Whitlam: A Moment in History

About the book

Acclaimed biographer Jenny Hocking's Gough Whitlam: A Moment in History is the first contemporary and definitive biographical study of the former Labor Prime Minister.

From his childhood in the fledging city of Canberra to his first appearance as Prime Minister (playing Neville Chamberlain), to his extensive war service in the Pacific and marriage to Margaret, the champion swimmer and daughter of Justice Wilfred Dovey, the biography draws on previously unseen archival material, extensive interviews with family and colleagues, and exclusive interviews with Gough Whitlam himself.

Hocking's narrative skill and scrupulous research reveals an extraordinary and complex man, whose life is, in every way, formed by the remarkable events of previous generations of his family, and who would, in turn, change Australian political and cultural developments in the twentieth century. (Melbourne University Publishing)

About the author

Jenny Hocking is Research Professor in the National Centre for Australian Studies at Monash University. She is the author of two major political biographies, Lionel Murphy: A Political Biography, shortlisted in the South Australian Festival Awards for Literature: National Non-Fiction Awards, and Frank Hardy: Politics Literature Life, shortlisted in the NSW Premier's History Awards. Jenny has also written extensively on counter-terrorism and democracy, most recently in Terror Laws: ASIO, Counter-terrorism and the Threat to Democracy.

Judges' comments

No stranger to the political biography, Hocking gives us a portrait of a man who has cast a longer shadow on Australia's history than most of his predecessors or successors as Prime Minister. There have been many books on Whitlam as Prime Minister—yet no detailed biographic account of his long and remarkable life, of his journey to the Lodge. Hocking combines fine writing with exemplary research including extended interviews with Whitlam and his family. A vivid and engaging book.

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The Tall Man: Death and Life on Palm Island

About the book

The Tall Man is the story of Palm Island, the tropical paradise where one morning Cameron Doomadgee swore at a policeman and forty minutes later lay dead in a watch-house cell. It is the story of that policeman, the tall, enigmatic Christopher Hurley who chose to work in some of the toughest and wildest places in Australia, and of the struggle to bring him to trial.

A unique work of investigation, The Tall Man takes the reader into the courtroom, into the once notorious Queensland police force, and into the Indigenous communities of the Far North—places where people live lives like no others, have a relationship with the land like no others, and a history, culture and catastrophic present like no others. This is Australia, but an Australia that few of us have seen. The Tall Man is a story in luminous detail of two worlds clashing—and a haunting moral puzzle that no reader will forget. (Penguin Books)

About the author

Chloe Hooper won a Walkley Award for her writing on the inquest into the death of Cameron Doomadgee, published in The Monthly and internationally. Her first novel, A Child's Book of True Crime, was critically acclaimed around the world. Chloe's most recent book, The Tall Man, won the 2009 New South Wales Premier's Literary Award for Non-Fiction and the 2009 ABIA General Non-Fiction Book of the Year Award. She lives in Melbourne.

Judges' comments

After a long history of deaths in custody one more occurs—to become the most notorious and contested of all. Within 40 minutes of swearing at a policeman, Cameron Domadgee is dead in the watch house—and soon Palm Island, somewhere between a tropical paradise and an open prison, is ablaze. The Tall Man is Christopher Hurley, a copper who prided himself on his work with indigenous communities and is now accused by the rioters of murder. Hooper's fine book remains reasoned and reflective amidst the tumult and the tragedy of a legal and racial controversy that continues to this day.

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House of Exile: The Life and Times of Heinrich Mann and Nelly Kroeger-Mann

About the book

In 1933 the author and activist Heinrich Mann and his partner Nelly Kroeger fled Nazi Germany, finding refuge first in France and later, in great despair, in Los Angeles. Born into a wealthy middle class family in Lübeck, Heinrich was one of the leading representatives of Weimar culture; Nelly was twenty-seven years younger and a hostess in a Berlin bar.

Their story is crossed by others from their circle, including Heinrich's brother Thomas Mann, their friends Bertolt Brecht, Alfred Döblin, and Joseph Roth, the writers Egon Kisch, James Joyce, Franz Kafka, Virginia Woolf and Nettie Palmer. In train compartments, ship's cabins and rented rooms, they called upon what was left to them—their bodies, their minds, their books—and amidst the debris of an era of self-destruction, built their own annexes to the House of Exile. (Giramondo)

About the author

Evelyn Juers has lived in Hamburg, Sydney, London and Geneva. She has a PhD from the University of Essex on the Brontës and the practise of biography. She has contributed essays on art and literature to a wide range of Australian and international publications.

Judges' comments

An exemplar of the new 'group biography', Juers follows Heinrich, brother of one of the greatest twentieth century writers, to the US where he finds troubled refuge in Los Angeles. This book is remarkable for both its research and its prose. Juers has devoted years to the former and the skills of a novelist to the latter, seeing the horrors of the 1930s, in particular the desperate diaspora of Jews seeking to escape the malignancy of Nazism, through the experiences of one distinguished family.

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Drawing the Global Colour Line

About the book

At last a history of Australia in its dynamic global context. In the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, in response to the mobilisation and mobility of colonial and coloured peoples around the world, self-styled 'white men's countries' in South Africa, North America and Australasia worked in solidarity to exclude those peoples they defined as not-white—including Africans, Chinese, Indians, Japanese and Pacific Islanders. Their policies provoked in turn a long international struggle for racial equality.

Through a rich cast of characters that includes Alfred Deakin, WEB Du Bois, Mahatma Gandhi, Lowe Kong Meng, Tokutomi Soho, Jan Smuts and Theodore Roosevelt, leading Australian historians Marilyn Lake and Henry Reynolds tell a gripping story about the circulation of emotions and ideas, books and people in which Australia emerged as a pace-setter in the modern global politics of whiteness. The legacy of the White Australia policy still casts a shadow over relations with the peoples of Africa and Asia, but campaigns for racial equality have created new possibilities for a more just future.

Remarkable for the breadth of its research and its engaging narrative, Drawing the Global Colour Line offers a new perspective on the history of human rights and provides compelling and original insight into the international political movements that shaped the twentieth century. (Melbourne University Publishing)

About the authors

Marilyn Lake holds a Personal Chair in the School of Historical and European Studies at LaTrobe University, Melbourne. Her publications include Getting Equal: The History of Australian Feminism (1999), Faith: Faith Bandler, Gentle Activist (2002) and, as co-editor, Connected Worlds: History in Transnational Perspective (with Ann Curthoys, 2006).

Henry Reynolds holds a Personal Chair in History and Aboriginal Studies at the University of Tasmania. His previous publications include The Other Side of the Frontier (1981), Why Weren't We Told? (2000) and The Law of the Land (2003).

Judges' comments

The White Australia Policy did not exist in isolation. It was called into being because around the world racial attitudes were changing and being dangerously politicised. Kindled in the bigotries of the nineteenth century, the issue of race would become the most dominant and disastrous fracture line in the twentieth and shows little sign of fading in the twenty-first. In their masterful overview of the prejudices of the wider world Lake and Reynolds help us see White Australia more clearly. This book on history has urgent relevance.

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The Henson Case

About the book

On Thursday 22 May 2008, Bill Henson, one of Australia's most significant artists, was preparing his new Sydney exhibition. It featured photographs of naked adolescent models. That afternoon, triggered by a newspaper column and the outrage of talkback radio hosts, a controversy exploded in response to these images.

David Marr, one of Australia's leading journalists, tells the story of this dramatic public trial. The Henson Case is a remarkable investigative essay which draws on Marr's extensive interviews with Bill Henson and features eight photographs from the Sydney show. (Text Publishing)

About the author

David Marr is one of Australia's most respected journalists. He has written for The Sydney Morning Herald and The Bulletin, won a Walkley for his reportage on ‘'Four Corners’ and presented ‘Media Watch’ on ABC TV. His is the award-winning author of several books, including Patrick White: a Life and His Master's Voice, The Corruption of Public Debate Under Howard, and he co-authored Dark Victory with Marian Wilkinson.

Judges' comments

The uproar created by the exhibition of one photograph of a pubescent girl in a Sydney art gallery seemed to take Australia back decades into the good old days of moral panics and censorship wrangles. Yet it raised complex issues that divided the art world as deeply as public and political opinion. David Marr tries to reverse the ratio of heat and light with his calm account of a raging controversy.

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American Journeys

About the book

Only in America—the most powerful democracy on earth, home to the best and worst of everything—are the most extreme contradictions possible. In a series of journeys acclaimed author Don Watson set out to explore the nation that has influenced him more than any other. Travelling by rail gave Watson a unique and seductive means of peering into the United States.

Through the people he meets, Watson discovers the incomparable genius of America, its optimism, sophistication and riches—and also its darker side, its disavowal of failure and uncertainty. Beautifully written, with gentle power and sly humour, American Journeys investigates the meaning of the United States: its confidence, its religion, its heroes, its violence, and its material obsessions. The things that make America great are also its greatest flaws. (Random House)

About the author

Don Watson's Recollections of a Bleeding Heart: Paul Keating Prime Minister, won The Age Book of the Year and Non-Fiction Prizes, The Courier-Mail Book of the Year, the National Biography Award and the Australian Literary Studies Association's Book of the Year. His Quarterly Essay, Rabbit Syndrome: Australia and America, won the Alfred Deakin Essay Prize. Death Sentence, his best-selling book about the decay of public language won the Australian Booksellers Association Book of the Year 2003. Watson's Dictionary of Weasel Words, another best-seller, was published in 2004. His most recent book, American Journeys, won The Age Non-Fiction and Book of the Year Awards in 2008. It also won the inaugural Indie Award for Non-Fiction and the Walkley Award for Non-Fiction.

Judges' comments

Whether it's Australia observed by D.H. Lawrence, England observed by Oscar Wilde (or Barry Humphries) or the United States by Don Watson, much of the most acute analysis comes from the visitor. Watson follows in de Tocqueville's footsteps but provides his own brand of scepticism and wit. Resisting the temptation to dwell on George W. Bush, Watson nonetheless writes a book to cause neo-conservatives acute discomfort. Watson's active role in Australian politics informs his observations—from the New Orleans of Cyclone Katrina to the beltway. What was clearly therapeutic for Watson is a delight to the reader.

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Fiction

The Pages

About the book

At dawn, two women leave Sydney to drive over the Blue Mountains, into the dry outback landscape and the home of the late philosopher Wesley Antill.

Erica, a philosopher herself, has been asked by her university to review Wesley's work, to read his notes—the pages. They are as Wesley left them, unread, untouched, at the rural property run by Wesley's sister Lindsey and brother Roger. Sophie, a psychoanalyst whose professional skills in listening seem to be confined to her patients, accompanies her friend, painting her toenails in the passenger seat and reeling off her opinions of the various qualities of her current man.

In this wry literary novel ideas intersect with experience, city sophistication with rural landscape, philosophy with psychology, as each woman searches for her own truth, and the life, and philosophy, of Wesley Antill unfolds. (Text Publishing)

About the author

Murray Bail was born in Adelaide in 1941. After spending several years in Bombay and five years in London, he now lives in Sydney. His first novel, Homesickness, won two major literary awards: the 1980 National Book Council Award for Australian literature and the 1980 Age Book of the Year Award. Other books include The Drover's Wife and Other Stories and non-fiction title Ian Fairweather. Holden's Performance was the winner of the 1988 Vance Palmer Prize for Fiction. Eucalyptus, published in 1998, was the winner of the Commonwealth Writers Prize 1999, the Miles Franklin Award 1999 and was shortlisted for 1999 Victorian Premier's Literary Awards (fiction). His latest novel, The Pages, was shortlisted for the Vance Palmer Prize and the Miles Franklin.

Judges' comments

In Murray Bail's latest novel, The Pages, a work of masterly compression, the death of a reclusive philosopher on a sheep station in western New South Wales leads his surviving brother and sister to call for an expert appraisal of his work. Thus amateur and professional, rural and urban, private and public realms are juxtaposed. An intense, but quiet drama develops in a series of sharply etched scenes, as secrecy and solitude, betrayal and faith are revealed in their tenacious power over individuals. Once again, Bail has made a fresh, unpredictable departure in, and renewal of his fiction.

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People of the Book

About the book

People of the Book crosses continents and centuries to bring stories of hope amidst darkness, compassion amidst cruelty, all bound together by the discoveries made by a young Australian woman restoring an ancient Hebrew book.

When Hanna Heath gets a call in the middle of the night in her Sydney home about a precious medieval manuscript that has been recovered from the smouldering ruins of war-torn Sarajevo, she knows she is on the brink of the experience of a lifetime. A renowned book conservator, she must now make her way to Bosnia to start work on restoring the Sarajevo Haggadah—a Jewish prayer book—to discover its secrets and piece together the story of its miraculous survival. But the trip will also set in motion a series of events that threaten to rock Hanna's orderly life, including her encounter with Ozren Karamen, the young librarian who risked his life to save the book.

As meticulously researched as all of Brooks's previous work, People of the Book is a gripping and moving novel about war, art, love and survival. (Harper Collins)

About the author

Geraldine Brooks is the author of the Pulitzer Prize-winning March, Year of Wonders, and the non-fiction works Nine Parts of Desire and Foreign Correspondence. Previously, Brooks was a correspondent for the Wall Street Journal in Bosnia, Somalia, and the Middle East. Born and raised in Australia, she divides her time between Sydney and Martha's Vineyard, Massachusetts. She lives with her husband, the author Tony Horwitz, and their two sons, Nathaniel and Bizuayehu.

Judges' comments

Based on the true story of the improbable survival of an ancient Jewish manuscript, the Sarajevo Haggadah, Geraldine Brooks's People of the Book, moves deftly from Australia to Bosnia, from the troubled present back to an equally violent and unstable past. This is a thriller that lightly wears its considerable scholarship at the same time as it takes us into the terrors of imperilled lives. The heroine—an Australian, if not an innocent abroad—is confronted in violent practice with cultural differences that she had only known in theory. Brooks writes eloquently of fortitude, devotion and acts of redeeming heroism.

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Wanting

About the book

Bass Strait, 1839. A young Aboriginal girl, Mathinna, runs through the wet wallaby grass of a wild island at the edge of the world to get help for her dying father. Eighteen years later in Manchester, the great novelist Charles Dickens stars in a play that more and more resembles the frozen landscape of his own inner life. The most celebrated explorer of the age, Sir John Franklin, and his wife, Lady Jane, adopt Mathinna as an experiment to prove that the savage can be civilised—only to discover that within the most civilised can lurk the most savage. When Sir John disappears in the Arctic while searching for the fabled Northwest Passage, Lady Jane turns to Dickens for help.

Inspired by historical events, Wanting is a haunting meditation about love, loss and the way life is finally determined never by reason, but only ever by wanting. (Random House)

About the author

Richard Flanagan was born in Tasmania in 1961. Regarded internationally as one of Australia's pre-eminent novelists, his multi-award winning novels, Death of a River Guide, The Sound of One Hand Clapping, Gould's Book of Fish and The Unknown Terrorist have been published to popular success and critical acclaim in twenty-five countries. His most recent book Wanting was shortlisted for the 2009 Miles Franklin Literary award. He directed a feature film version of The Sound of One Hand Clapping and most recently collaborated with Baz Luhrmann on the script for Luhrmann's recent blockbuster, Australia. He lives in Hobart with his family.

Judges' comments

Richard Flanagan's historical novel, Wanting, maps two psychologically damaged societies, geographically distant, but intimately connected. They are colonial Van Diemen's Land under the governorship of Sir John Franklin and the London of Charles Dickens, who will be enlisted in strange circumstances to protect Franklin's reputation. This is also the story of the lamentable fate of the Aboriginal girl Mathinna, adopted by Franklin's wife, only to be cast into a cultural chasm. The historical backgrounds of the novel are sketched with exemplary imaginative daring: the idioms and mental landscapes of a lost world are strikingly brought back to us.

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Everything I Knew

About the book

Peter Goldsworthy's high-octane, fourteen-year-old narrator Robbie Burns has creative energy to burn— physical and mental, sexual and literary, constructive and destructive. Coming of age in a small town peopled with big characters, he finds his new teacher Miss Peach the most unforgettable of all—his memories of her will haunt him for the rest of his life.

Everything I Knew is at once laugh-out-loud funny and cry-out-loud tragic—farcical, horrifying, confronting— and bursting with originality. It challenges our determination to believe in the innocence of childhood and adolescence, and yet again shows Peter Goldsworthy to be a master of shifting tone. There is no novel quite like it in Australian literature. (Penguin Books)

About the author

Peter Goldsworthy grew up in various Australian country towns, finishing his schooling in Darwin. Since graduating in medicine from the University of Adelaide in 1974, he has divided his working time equally between medicine and writing. He has won major literary awards across a range of genres: poetry, short story, the novel, opera, and most recently in theatre. His novels have been translated into many European and Asian languages; his 2003 novel, Three Dog Night, won the FAW Christina Stead Award. He wrote the libretti for the Richard Mills operas Summers of the Seventeenth Doll and Batavia, the latter winning Mills and Goldsworthy the 2002 Robert Helpmann Award for Best New Australian Work, and a Green Room Award for Special Creative Achievement. Three Dog Night and Honk If You Are Jesus have been adapted for the stage, the latter winning the 2006 Advertiser Oscart Award for Best Play, and the 2006 Ruby Award for Best New Work. Five of his novels are currently in development as movies, and two more for the stage.

Judges' comments

The conventional rite of passage story tracing the progress from adolescence to young adult becomes altogether bleaker and more engrossing than usual in Peter Goldsworthy's Everything I Knew. Besides skilfully depicting the society of a small Australian town—its communal life, its solitaries, the web of gossip, remembrance and speculation in which all are enmeshed— the novel also deals with a teenager's struggle for both sexual and intellectual awareness. The consequences of his dreams and desires will sadly and indelibly mark his future. The novel is a triumphant rendering of provincial life and the costs of escape from it.

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One Foot Wrong

About the book

A child is imprisoned in a house by her reclusive religious parents. Hester has never seen the outside world; her companions are Cat, Spoon, Door, Handle, Broom, and they all speak to her. Her imagination is informed by one book, an illustrated child's bible, and its imagery forms the sole basis for her capacity to make poetic connection.

One day Hester takes a brave Alice in Wonderland trip into the forbidden outside (at the behest of Handle—‘turn me turn me’), and this overwhelming encounter with light and sky and sunshine is a marvel to her. From this moment on, Hester learns the concept of the secret, and not telling, and the world becomes something that fills her with feeling as if she is a vessel, empty and bottomless for need of it.

The story told by Hester in One Foot Wrong is often dark and terrible, but the sheer blazing brilliance of her language and the imagery that illuminates the pages make this novel an exhilarating, enlightening and joyous act of faith. The stars shine brightest out of the deepest dark. (Allen and Unwin)

About the author

Sofie Laguna has previously written for children and young adults (Bird and Sugar Boy, My Yellow Blankie, Too Loud Lily and Bad Buster). She is also an actor. One Foot Wrong is her first adult novel. She lives in Melbourne.

Judges' comments

Sofie Laguna's first novel for adults, One Foot Wrong, is one of the most starkly disturbing and original treatments of the lost child motif in Australian literature. This devastating tale of the harm done by parents to their daughter maintains an eerie equilibrium despite the cruelties that are related. The tormented but vivid imagination of the victim is registered in writing that is remarkable for its experimental daring. In a world of predators, innocence is terribly beset. It is the distinction of Laguna's novel that this is related without sensationalism, the better to harrow us.

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The Boat

About the book

In 1979, Nam Le's family left Vietnam for Australia, an experience that inspires the first and last stories in The Boat. In between, however, Le's imagination lays claim to the world. The Boat takes us from a tourist in Tehran to a teenage hit man in Columbia; from an ageing New York artist to a boy coming of age in a small Victorian fishing town; from the city of Hiroshima just before the bomb is dropped to the haunting waste of the South China Sea in the wake of another war.

Each story uncovers a raw human truth. Each story is absorbing and fully realised as a novel. Together, they make up a collection of astonishing diversity and achievement. (Penguin Books)

About the author

Nam Le was born in Vietnam and grew up in Melbourne. He is currently the fiction editor at the Harvard Review. His work has been published in Overland, Zoetrope, A Public Space, Conjunctions and One Story, and anthologised in The Best Australian Stories 2007, The Best American Nonrequired Reading 2007, Best New American Voices 2009, and The Pushcart Prize 2008.

Judges' comments

Nam Le's collection of fiction, The Boat, which comprises short and long stories, artfully arrayed, is one of the most impressive debuts of recent years. The range of subjects and settings astonishes, as does the assurance and control with which the author immerses us in the stories that he makes from them. While the span of the fiction is cosmopolitan, each story is intensely attuned to the local circumstances that deform and enable the lives of these varied characters, animated as they are by love and despair. As shown especially in the final and title story, Nam Le combines almost reckless artistic boldness with highly disciplined craft.

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The Good Parents

About the book

Maya de Jong, an eighteen-year-old country girl from the West, comes to live in Melbourne and starts an affair with her enigmatic boss, 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.

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. (Random House)

About the author

Joan London is the author of two prize-winning collections of stories, Sister Ships, which won The Age Book of the Year in 1986, and Letter to Constantine, which won the Steele Rudd Award in 1994 and the 1996 WA Premier's Award for Fiction. These collections were published in one volume by Picador as The New Dark Age. In 2001 her first novel, Gilgamesh, was published, and was shortlisted for the Miles Franklin, as well as a host of other awards, and chosen as the Age Book of the Year for Fiction in 2002. It was also longlisted for the Orange Prize and the Dublin Impac.

The Good Parents, Joan London's most recent novel, was published in April 2008 to acclaim. It has since been reprinted three times, was the winner of the 2009 Christina Stead Prize for fiction in the NSW Premier's Literary award and was shortlisted for The Age Fiction Book of the Year. It will be published in the UK and US as well as Europe in 2009.

Judges' comments

In The Good Parents, Joan London examines with even-handed compassion the consequences for both parents and children when members of the older generation must face the constriction of an earlier, heedless freedom, and the younger must seek to find a way of their own. This is a novel of manifold abandonments, and of a compensating search for connection and expiation. London's stylistic clarity allows shocks and blessings to be more sharply illuminated. This both a caustic and consoling anatomy of modern Australian life, shadowed at once by myths of a carefree past and anxiety about where a future might be.

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Last updated: 2 March 2010, 10:08am