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Today’s read – a Miles Franklin Award Winer

The Time we have taken
by Steven Carroll

Winner of the 2008 Miles Franklin Award

That exotic tribe was us. And the time we have taken, our moment. The straight line of history has led, and was always leading, to this day and they have all been lucky enough to be alive, right now, to greet the moment. THE TIME WE HAVE TAKEN is both a meditation on the rhythms of suburban life and a luminous exploration of public and private reckoning during a time of radical change. 'a writer worth cherishing. His prose is unfailingly assured, lyrical, poised' - The Australian. 'moving and indelible in its evocation of the extraordinary in ordinary lives' - Miles Franklin Literary Award Judges.

Buy the book here

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Miles Franklin Winner for 2010

Winner of the Miles Franklin Award for 2010:  Peter Temple's thriller, Truth

Truth is a novel about a man, a family, a city. It is about violence, murder, love, corruption, honour and deceit. And it is about truth.

Peter Temple moves into the territory of The Bonfire of the Vanities and JM Coetzee's Disgrace with a masterpiece of modern fiction. A teenage prostitute is found with her neck broken in a bathroom in an apartment in The Prosilio, a new playground for the very rich. Despite the ultra sophisticated security, all systems crashed, the management is hand in glove with high ups in government and Stephen Villani, Head of Homicide, isn't getting much cooperation. Three men are found murdered in a garage, two of them so brutally tortured that it goes beyond the usual low-life revenge story. The suspects are then tipped off and die in a car accident, escaping from Villani. The public and populist politicians are baying for the police to take the blame for violent lawlessness and corruption. In this heartbreaking, nerve-wracking novel, Temple lays bare the soul of a man, Villani, as he faces the moral decline of a society and himself. Incapable of constancy as a father and a husband, damaged as a son and true only to his job and the confrontational stance he knows best, he seems unable to intervene while his teenage daughter runs with drug dealers. And while politicians and businessmen plot to make more money and buy people and their silence, the fires are coming closer from the outback to inhabited country, including where Villani's father lives.

You can buy the paperback for about $16 (and not pay any postage) here => http://bit.ly/bXmADo

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This year’s Miles Franklin winner – Breath by Tim Winton

breath Breath Winner Miles Franklin award for Literature 2009

by Tim Winton

This slender book packs an emotional wallop. Two thrill-seeking boys, Bruce and Loonie, are young teenagers in smalltown Australia, circa the early 1970s. Their attraction is focused on the water—ponds, rivers, the sea—but they do little more than play around until they fall in with a mysterious, older man named Sando. He recognizes their daredevil wildness and takes it upon himself to teach them to surf. As the boys become more skilled, their exploits become more reckless; narrator Bruce (nicknamed Pikelet) has doubts about where all this is heading, while the aptly named Loonie wants only bigger and bolder thrills.

http://www.pivotalbookclub.com/breath.htm