Literary Awards
Man Booker Prize 2011
The Man Booker Prize for Fiction represents the very best of contemporary fiction. One of the world's most distinctive awards, and one of incomparable influence, it continues to be the pinnacle for every fiction writer. Established by Booker plc in 1968, the prize aims to reward the best novel of the year written by a citizen of the Commonwealth or Republic of Ireland. The Man Booker judges are selected from the country's finest critics, writers and academics to maintain the consistent excellence of the prize. The winner receives £50,000 and both the winner and the shortlisted authors are guaranteed a worldwide audience and a dramatic increase in book sales.
The Sense of an Ending Julian Barnes $29.95
Tony Webster and his clique first met Adrian Finn at school. Sex-hungry and book-hungry, they would navigate the girl-less sixth form together, trading in affectations, in-jokes, rumour and wit. Maybe Adrian was a little more serious than the others, certainly more intelligent, but they all swore to stay friends for life. Now Tony is in middle age. He’s had a career and a single marriage, a calm divorce. He’s certainly never tried to hurt anybody. Memory, though, is imperfect. It can always throw up surprises, as a lawyer’s letter is about to prove. The Sense Of An Ending is the story of one man coming to terms with the mutable past. Laced with trademark precision, dexterity and insight, it is the work of one of the world’s most distinguished writers.
Prime Minister's Literary Awards 2011
The Prime Minister’s Literary Awards are a new initiative celebrating the contribution of Australian literature to the nation’s cultural and intellectual life. The awards, which will be held annually, recognise literature’s importance to our national identity, community and economy. A tax free prize of $100, 000 will be awarded to the work judged to be of the highest literary merit in each of two categories: Fiction Non-Fiction
Traitor Stephen Daisley $23.95
What would make a soldier betray his country? In the battle-smoke and chaos of Gallipoli, a young New Zealand soldier helps a Turkish doctor fighting to save a boy’s life. Then a shell bursts nearby; the blast that should have killed them both consigns them instead to the same military hospital. Mahmoud is a Sufi. A whirling dervish, he says, of the Mevlevi order. He tells David stories. Of arriving in London with a pocketful of dried apricots. Of Majnun, the man mad for love, and of the saint who flew to paradise on a lion skin. You are God, we are all gods, Mahmoud tells David; and a bond grows between them. A bond so strong that David will betray his country for his friend. Stephen Daisley’s astonishing debut novel is a story of war and of love—how each changes everything, forever. Evoking horror and beauty and a profound sense of the possibility of transformation, Traitor is that rarest of things: a work of fiction that will transport the reader, heart and soul, into another realm.
Orange Prize 2011
The Orange Prize is awarded to the best novel of the year written in English by a woman.
The Tiger's Wife Tea Obreht $29.99
As Natalia and a friend travel across the former Yugoslavia, immunising villagers, the body of her grandfather turns up in a hospital in the middle of nowhere. She and her family have no idea why. Recalling stories he told her as a child, she becomes convinced that he went in search of the Deathless Man, a mythical figure, that her grandfather claimed to have met a number of times in his life. In her quest to find out how her grandfather, a man of hard fact and science, could turn to this fantasy, she discovers something particular about his childhood: a tiger escaped from a zoo during World War II bombings and wandered deep into the woods, settling just outside his peasant village. It terrorized the town, the devil incarnate to everyone, except for her grandfather and 'the tiger's wife'...
The Vogel Literary Award 2011
The Vogel literary prize is awarded to an unpublished Australian author, under the age of 35.
The Roving Party Rohan Wilson $27.99
1829, Tasmania. John Batman, ruthless, singleminded; four convicts, the youngest still only a stripling; Gould, a downtrodden farmhand; two free black trackers; and powerful, educated Black Bill, brought up from childhood as a white man. This is the roving party and their purpose is massacre. With promises of freedom, land grants and money, each is willing to risk his life for the prize. Passing over many miles of tortured country, the roving party searches for Aborigines, taking few prisoners and killing freely, Batman never abandoning the visceral intensity of his hunt. And all the while, Black Bill pursues his personal quarry, the much-feared warrior, Manalargena. A surprisingly beautiful evocation of horror and brutality, The Roving Party is a meditation on the intricacies of human nature at its most raw.
Pulizter Prize for Non-Fiction 2011
The Emperor of all Maladies Siddhartha Mukherjee $35.00
The Emperor of All Maladies is a magnificent, profoundly humane “biography” of cancer—from its first documented appearances thousands of years ago through the epic battles in the twentieth century to cure, control, and conquer it to a radical new understanding of its essence. Physician, researcher, and award-winning science writer, Siddhartha Mukherjee examines cancer with a cellular biologist’s precision, a historian’s perspective, and a biographer’s passion. The result is an astonishingly lucid and eloquent chronicle of a disease humans have lived with—and perished from—for more than five thousand years. The story of cancer is a story of human ingenuity, resilience, and perseverance, but also of hubris, paternalism, and misperception.
Pulitzer Prize for Fiction 2011
A Visit from the Goon Squad Jennifer Egan $24.99
From Africa to Naples, New York to San Francisco, from the 1970s to our not too distant future, we follow Bennie Salazar, an aging music mogul, and Sasha, his young PA, on their journeys through childhood, parties, careers and lovers. A Visit from the Goon Squad captures the moments where lives interact, as Bennie’s and Sasha’s fortunes ebb and flow. Egan depicts with elegant prose and often heart-wrenching simplicity, the sad consequences for those who couldn’t fake it during their wild youth – madness, suicide or prison – in this captivating, wryly humorous story of temptation and loss.
Pulitzer Price for General Non-Fiction 2011
The Emperor of all Maladies Siddhartha Mukherjee $35.00
The Emperor of All Maladies is a magnificent, profoundly humane “biography” of cancer—from its first documented appearances thousands of years ago through the epic battles in the twentieth century to cure, control, and conquer it to a radical new understanding of its essence. Physician, researcher, and award-winning science writer, Siddhartha Mukherjee examines cancer with a cellular biologist’s precision, a historian’s perspective, and a biographer’s passion. The result is an astonishingly lucid and eloquent chronicle of a disease humans have lived with—and perished from—for more than five thousand years. The story of cancer is a story of human ingenuity, resilience, and perseverance, but also of hubris, paternalism, and misperception.
