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The Guardian
23-07-2025
- Entertainment
- The Guardian
Miles Franklin 2025: your guide to the shortlist of Australia's biggest literary prize
All dull awards shortlist books that are alike; every important award recognises books that are remarkable in their own way. This is what makes them worth paying attention to, what makes following them fun – and this year's Miles Franklin award shortlist is no exception. All six books hail from different publishers. Each book is markedly different in genre, style and form. The self is an uncertain site in all these books – one where concepts like nationhood, sexuality, class and ethnicity are negotiated. There is a portrait of coming-of-age and Tongan community, a bawdy historical novel told by a self-styled horse thief, and an interlinked short-story cycle that turns on the omens and aftershocks of a serial killing. And three very different novels of ideas playfully reference other texts (as well as themselves) – and draw attention to how they are made. Notably, Fiona McFarlane's Highway 13 is the first work of linked stories to be shortlisted for the prize, which is awarded to 'the novel of the highest literary merit'. But the shortlist is not, curiously enough, diverse in length: none of the entries break 400 pages, though Burruberongal writer Julie Janson's Compassion comes close. 'I was never good at philosophy,' quips Abraham Quin, Chinese Postman's occasional narrator. After being humiliated by his philosophy tutor at university, he learns to see himself in the third person as well as the first, to move 'easily between the two'. This gives us the basic shape of Castro's narrative, which takes the form of a series of ruminations, in either Quin's voice or a close third-person perspective. So: philosophy's out. Quin is also 'through with all that novel-writing'. Despite this protest, Castro's book is best described as a philosophical novel or a novel of ideas. Chinese Postman is largely plotless, though Quin's email correspondence with a Ukrainian woman named Iryna Zarębina gives it a flexible spine. Quin has a penchant for maxims, particularly when their content is scatological. 'Shit', in his telling, is 'a symptom of lowly creation's failure to survive as gods'. It is, for him, a substance 'without hierarchy', in which 'All are equalised'. Reflections of this kind are Quin's way of 'composting' – rather than composing – his thoughts. For those who read for the sheer delight of allusive, tricky, irreverent sentences, Chinese Postman will be the most exciting work on the shortlist. Compassion is the shortlist's only realist historical novel. Set between the years 1836 and 1854, it is a story of maternal reconciliation and paternal reckoning told largely from the point of view of a Darug woman named Duringah, who escapes abuse and traverses Darkinjung and Awabakal country (as well as the country of many other clans and nations) in order to return home. Compassion is a sequel: it continues the dramatised life story of Janson's ancestors from her 2020 novel, Benevolence, which centred on Duringah's (now-estranged) mother, Muraging. In turning to Duringah, who takes up the alias Eleanor James, Compassion flirts with conventions drawn from an array of literary and popular genres, including colonial romance, revisionist history, melodrama and the picaresque. Duringah outwits and eludes colonial authorities with palpable glee. But Compassion has its heartfelt scenes, too. Duringah's arrival at a mission station, where Koori women sing a church hymn, serves as the occasion for a moment of reverence and some of Janson's best writing. Their voices, 'pure like bells', summon memories of 'singing the country with a corroboree'. Yet this memory culminates in a plea for quiet, lest their songs become a 'beacon for vengeful white men'. This tension – between the desire to speak up, and the risks of doing so – lies at the heart of Janson's truth-telling project. Winnie Dunn once remarked in an interview that she considers 'all forms of writing' to be 'autobiographical fiction'. This has clearly informed her work as an editor for the Sweatshop Literacy Movement, as well as her debut novel. Semi-autobiographical writing, as Dirt Poor Islanders well knows, always takes place in productive tension with the right to privacy – of the writer's family and their broader community. The novel's first chapter thinks this through when Dunn's Tongan-Australian avatar, Meadow Reed, locates her family members in the blotches, beauty spots and wrinkles on her grandmother's face. This intimate moment is promptly interrupted by their racist neighbour Shazza, who tells the pair to 'eff off to Fiji'. This suggests Dunn's keen awareness of the risk of telling stories grounded in personal experience before an ignorant, even hostile, audience. Dirt Poor Islanders refuses to be cowed by this risk. Like two of her clear influences, Melissa Lucashenko and Michael Mohammed Ahmad, Dunn responds by doubling down. Meadow unapologetically narrates scenes of cockroach eating and chicken plucking, force feeding and constipation, menstruation and childbirth. 'From nits having sex on my head', thinks Meadow, 'to maggots wriggling in lumps of lard to cockroaches crawling in cereal boxes and cushion crevices, I asked, 'Y'.' Dunn's answer? A sanitised self is barely half an identity – and 'No one could live as half of themselves'. Ghost Cities is an ingeniously structured novel that takes tyranny as its central theme. At its heart are two dictators – an emperor and a director – both prone to issuing capricious edicts to terrorise their hapless subjects. Both come to preside over labyrinthine cities, implied to be millennia apart. The emperor reigns over the Imperial City, the director over a ghost city named Port Man Tou, peopled by ill-paid actors. The cities are opposed, respectively, by Lu Shan Liang and Xiang Lu, whose names resemble their author's. The novel's wacky, erratic plot plays out across alternating chapters through two timelines, their narratives routinely contorted by the whims of their respective dictators. At one point, Xiang Lu mentions he is partway through Vladimir Nabokov's early novel, Invitation to a Beheading. Nabokov's burlesque of tyrannical logic is one of many texts Ghost Cities is in dialogue with. But Ghost Cities most strikingly resembles another Nabokov novel, Pale Fire. Both novels have a long poem at their centre (in loose iambic pentameter); both feature half-comic assassination attempts. They share an ear for the comedy of translation and an eye for the absurd. Ghost Cities both embraces and defies its emperor's directive to abandon 'the pursuit of beauty' for art that favours 'furrowed brows and scholar-like interpretation'. In its zany intertextuality, it displays a level of intellectual ambition rarely found in recent fiction. The 12 stories that make up Highway 13 are all loosely connected to a single man, Paul Biga, the perpetrator of a series of brutal highway murders, whose facts reference (but don't mirror) those of the convicted backpacker murderer Ivan Milat, arrested in 1994. Interestingly, Highway 13 is the only book shortlisted not to make extensive use of first-person narration. The settings range from 1950 to 2028, and span Australia, the US and Europe. They extend a preoccupation with the uncanny that runs through McFarlane's body of work. Stylistically, McFarlane errs on the side of minimalism. These are stories of considerable subtlety and restraint. Highway 13 endeavours to surprise – not at the level of the individual sentence, but in what its sentences imply. It invites us to notice: when the bodies of stink beetles are dumped in a garden corner where 'ants had made feasts of the softer flesh', we can't help but see in their decomposing corpses the shadow of a crime. Highway 13 is more concerned with the murders' distant precursors (in the lives of others) and long-term ramifications (the way it resurfaces after the event) than in finding narrow causes. It tactfully avoids too-obvious parallels between the fictional Paul Biga and real Ivan Milat. In these ways, McFarlane creates space for her marvellous collection to linger with the living, with those bound to each other in their respective presents by fragile forms of love. Theory and Practice takes place primarily in St Kilda, Melbourne, in 1986. It is narrated by a female university student, unnamed for most of the novel, who is writing her thesis on Virginia Woolf. 'Theory', she observes with distaste, has 'conquered the humanities', especially the English department where she studies. When compelled to read theorists, rather than the novels she loves, she feels 'headachey and crushed'. Even the work of feminist and postcolonial theorists, which she draws on to help explain her life as a Sri Lankan woman from Sydney, leaves her ambivalent. 'Practice', on the other hand, describes her life as it is lived. In this novel, practice decidedly wins. The narrator is vexed by casual lovers – she is having an affair with a fellow student in a 'deconstructed relationship' – and hypocritical professors. She's also outraged by a diary entry in which Woolf describes Ceylonese freedom fighter EW Perera as a 'poor little mahogany coloured wretch'. Theory and Practice is at its best when it embraces its title's distinction, which it elsewhere compellingly glosses as the distinction between 'realism and reality', through a cast of characters adept at talking their way out of our attempts to interrogate them. The Miles Franklin literary award will be announced on 24 July This article was originally published by the Conversation. Joseph Steinberg is a Forrest foundation postdoctoral fellow in English and literary studies at the University of Western Australia
The Guardian
18-05-2025
- Entertainment
- The Guardian
A Danish Groundhog Day or tales of millennial angst… What should win next week's International Booker?
What unites the books on the shortlist for this year's International Booker prize? Brevity, for one thing: five of the six are under 200 pages, and half barely pass 100. They are works of precision and idiosyncrasy that don't need space to make a big impression. Themes are both timely – AI, the migration crisis – and evergreen: middle-class ennui; the place of women in society. And for the second consecutive year, every book comes from an independent publisher, with four from tiny micropresses. Ahead of the winner announcement on 20 May, here's our verdict on the shortlist. Solvej Balle's On the Calculation of Volume, Book I (Faber, £12.99; translated by Barbara J Haveland) is easiest to introduce through the film Groundhog Day: its heroine, Danish antiquarian book dealer Tara Selter, is stuck in time. 'It is the 18th of November,' she writes. 'I have got used to that thought.' Each time she wakes up, it's the same day again, same weather, same people passing the window. This book, the first of a projected seven volumes, mostly explores Tara's set-up. Despite the cool tone, there's a sense of excitement for the reader as Tara works out the possibilities in real time. Can she travel overnight? If she takes something out of a cupboard, will it return the next day? And are we all somehow like Tara, living the same day over and over? The high concept, and the sense of a major work under way, make it a strong contender. Even if future volumes don't live up to this one, for now the reader is happy to be trapped alongside Tara. An even more ambitious headspinner is Japanese novelist Hiromi Kawakami's Under the Eye of the Big Bird (Granta, £14.99; translated by Asa Yoneda). If Kawakami has a sweet mode (Strange Weather in Tokyo) and a weird mode (Record of a Night Too Brief), this one is in the latter category. It's a sort of do-it-yourself work: what seems to be a collection of stories turns out to be a novel, but the reader must piece it together. We're hundreds of years in the future; countries have disappeared and humans are grouped into self-contained communities. Some people are clones, others exist in a world with hardly any men, and there are unexplained categories of people: 'watchers', 'scanners', 'the mothers'. Characters recur across chapters and regions, but they're too thinly drawn to easily tell apart. But that's OK: this book is about its ideas, including how societies break down, how we doom ourselves with our failure to get along, and how AI threatens us. Given that human intelligence is so riven with conflict, the book suggests, we might be ripe for replacement by machines. ('Let's wrap this up,' says one character of humanity.) Its mysteries mean that by the end, when we finally know what's going on, the book demands rereading – a durability that makes it a plausible Booker winner. If Kawakami isn't much interested in character, the opposite is true of French novelist Anne Serre's A Leopard-Skin Hat (Lolli, £11.99; translated by Mark Hutchinson). Right from the start, Fanny is alarming young children and 'had a way of standing […] like a question'. Her full-colour character is matched by the book's askew narrative style, which jumps around a lot. Alongside Fanny is the Narrator, who is not the narrator of the book but her lifelong friend. 'It was in slapstick mode they got along best.' We learn early on that Fanny died at the age of 43 ('her small, fair head ascends into the skies'), which gives the rest of the book – an account of her lifelong mental turmoil – added poignancy. The story teems with charm, a tribute to the unconventional and a warning of 'the violence done to the tender-hearted' in our conformist society. Fanny's friend seems to speak for Serre – who wrote the book following the death of her younger sister – when he says: 'I love realistic novels, yet the moment I try to write one I yawn with boredom.' There's no time for boredom in this delightful, sad, idiosyncratic story, though its unusual – even eccentric – style might limit its chances of Booker success. The other shortlisted French writer has a more grounded approach. Vincent Delecroix's Small Boat (HopeRoad, £12.99; translated by Helen Stevenson) is inspired by a real-life tragedy in November 2021, when 27 people died on an inflatable dinghy trying to cross the English channel from France. Most of the book is from the viewpoint of a French emergency call handler who fielded pleas for help from migrants on the boat, and who falsely told them no rescue vessels were available. Under investigation by police, our narrator is sometimes unrepentant ('these people … their obsession with flinging themselves into the water'), sometimes filled with shame. Why, she asks, is she blamed, rather than the geopolitical 'gigantic storm that sweeps behind them'? Her somewhat repetitive monologue is broken by a vivid account from the migrants' viewpoint, out on the 'insipid, bulging, surly sea', and the story ends with fitting grimness. Small Boat is undoubtedly timely, which may be why it's the bookies' favourite; but as a novel it lacks the depth of other shortlisted titles, and seems a long shot for the prize. The flexibility of the International Booker prize – it's not just for novels – is exemplified in Banu Mushtaq's collection of stories, Heart Lamp (And Other Stories, £14.99; translated by Deepa Bhasthi). The selection here is drawn from Mushtaq's 35-year career. She writes in the Indian tradition of 'Bandaya Sahitya' – protest literature against the domination of male-led, upper-caste writing – and her subject is the lives of women. In one story, a new mother whose husband is unfaithful and rude – 'One day he had said, 'You are like my mother', and with those words had pushed her alive into hell' – is told to be grateful he doesn't beat her. 'Thank God you are in a good situation.' In another, a man becomes obsessed with making his wife wear his sister-in-law's high-heeled shoes; elsewhere, a woman struggling with school holidays – Mushtaq's concerns are universal as well as culture-specific – takes her boys to the barber to be circumcised. The tone varies from quiet to comic, but the vision is consistent, as exemplified by the final story, where a woman questions why God requires her to be a 'helpless prisoner of life' in subjugation to her husband. Its title? Be a Woman Once, Oh Lord! This wonderful collection would be a worthy winner, though history is against it: stories have never taken the prize before. The most talked-about book on the shortlist is Italian writer Vincent Latronico's Perfection (Fitzcarraldo, £12.99; translated by Sophie Hughes). You can see why, from its relatability – it's the story of a modern millennial couple, Anna and Tom – to its literary connections: the book is a 'tribute', in Latronico's words, to French writer Georges Perec's 1965 novel Things. In both books, young professional lives have the constructed texture of an advert or social media stream, and are simultaneously given meaning and constrained by the need for possessions and cultural signifiers. Where Perec's couple had Paul Klee prints and Borges paperbacks, Latronico's have Monocle magazine and Radiohead vinyl. Written as a detached overview ('They lived a double life.' 'They tried travelling'), Perfection exerts a hypnotic hold as Anna and Tom face anew the same problem as every generation before them: how to live? They tie themselves in knots, 'worried they were content merely being contented', and slowly find themselves no longer the focal generation of their era, as the world changes around them. 'The cultural centre where old Greeks used to play cards was now the flagship store of a Japanese trainer brand.' Perfection packs a huge amount into a small space: its irony, modernity and irresistible style would make it a popular winner. The winner of the International Booker prize will be announced on 20 May.
