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Peter Carey's A Long Way From Home heralds the novelist's return to the fertile stomping grounds of Bacchus Marsh, his childhood home and frequent literary touchstone. Carey's rollicking, technicolour imagination is at full throttle in his descriptions of the Redex Trial: a bone-rattling and perilous trip around Australia that brings his three companions into contact with the vast continent in a way they have never experienced before. But the resulting journey becomes something far larger, stranger and more powerful than a car race across Australia's plains: it morphs into an interrogation of what home is, what it can mean, and how history can rarely be settled by maps or narratives found in books. A Long Way From Home shows Carey in high form, balancing the antic and the deadly serious on a knife's edge, and marks a powerful contribution to his oeuvre.

First Person by Richard Flanagan is a powerful and comic examination of the life of a writer. Flanagan takes us inside the mind of the writer as he tries to understand his craft, his subject and the world in which he writes. The author's alter ego, Kif Kehlmann, is commissioned to ghost write the memoir of a con man and the intersection of his life with that of his subject provides the momentum for an exploration of morality, capitalism and contemporary times. The loss of moral certitude in the face of financial reward looms large. Flanagan takes it all on in this compellingly biting satire.

The Life to Come by Michelle de Kretser is a sophisticated and cosmopolitan novel about lives displaced by trauma and travel. Five sections set in Sydney, Paris and Sri Lanka follow an ensemble of characters loosely connected by the striving Australian writer, Pippa Reynolds. The intricate narrative observes contemporary urban life at both macro and micro levels, from the politics of colonialism and immigration to the faux pas of tourists and the smell of a doomed spice shop in Sydney's inner-west. De Kretser is a perfectionist in her crafting of precise sentences, exquisite imagery and subtly shifting perspectives. Her laser-beam satire sees through pretension and ignorance, while paying respect to the lost and lonely. The Life to Come portrays Australia's multi-faceted identity with tremendous wit and insight.