"I wouldn't be a Miles Franklin judge this year for quids"
BRTD Buyer Karen ruminates on the prospects for this year's crop of Australian Fiction
His Illegal Self (Knopf, February) is Peter Carey's heart-stopping take on the anti-Vietnam War radicals of the 1970s, told from the viewpoint of an eight-year-old boy abandoned by his parents and brought up by his wealthy grandmother in New York until he is swept away by a young woman to a hippie commune in Queensland. In People Of The Book (Fourth Estate, February), Pulitzer Prize winner Geraldine Brooks builds her story around an ancient Hebrew book that has travelled across countries and centuries to be restored by an Australian woman.
The Spare Room (Text, April) by Helen Garner is a short, intense novel about the love and tensions between a woman called Helen and her friend Nicola, who moves in while having alternative treatment for cancer. Tim Winton, too, has had a break from writing novels and returns after seven years with Breath (Penguin, May), a book of the sea and no doubt a top bestseller. Addition: A Love Story (Text, February) by Toni Jordan is about a young woman obsessed with counting and was a hot property at the Frankfurt Book Fair. A Fraction Of The Whole (Penguin, March) is Steve Toltz's quirky first novel, which has sold in the US and Britain, and is written as the notes of a young prisoner remembering life with his brilliant but dysfunctional father.
It has been a nine-year wait for a second book from Julia Leigh, acclaimed author of The Hunter. Her gothic novella Disquiet (Penguin, April) is about a woman who enters a walled garden seeking her home, only to find tragedy has changed everyone. Joan London, best-known for short stories, has an eagerly anticipated second novel in The Good Parents (Random House, April). Luke Davies weaves fiction around the ageing Howard Hughes in God Of Speed (Allen & Unwin, April) and Christos Tsiolkas writes of modern family life in The Slap (Allen & Unwin, August).