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The shortlist for the $110,000 Australia-Asia Literary Award has been announced. The longlist of 12 entries has been narrowed to five finalists, below. All told, there were 111 entries from around the globe. The winner will be announced on November 21st, in Perth, WA.
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The Five Finalists for 2008: |
Michelle de Kretser
Tom Loxley, an Indian-Australian professor, is less concerned with finishing his book on Henry James than with finding his dog, who is lost in the Australian bush. Joining his daily hunt is Nelly Zhang, an artist whose husband disappeared mysteriously years before Tom met her. Although Nelly helps him search for his beloved pet, Tom isn't sure if he should trust this new friend.
Tom has preoccupations other than his book and Nelly and his missing dog, mainly concerning his mother, who is suffering from the various indignities of old age. He is constantly drawn from the cerebral to the primitive--by his mother's infirmities, as well as by Nelly's attractions. THE LOST DOG makes brilliant use of the conventions of suspense and atmosphere while leading us to see anew the ever-present conflicts between our bodies and our minds, the present and the past, the primal and the civilized.
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Ceridwen Dovey
A president has been overthrown by a military coup in a nameless country in an unspecified era. The president's barber, chef, and portraitist are imprisoned, with many others, in a remote palace in the hills high above the city center. Before the coup, these three men worked with unquestioning loyalty, serving the president in seemingly benign jobs. Now, forced to serve the country's new leader, they begin to reconsider their role in the old regime.
In simple, elegant prose Blood Kin alternates between the voices of the barber, the chef, and the portraitist. Later in the book their wives, lovers, and daughters tell their own tales. As the old order falls, so does the veil that hides the truth about these men and women's secret passions. No one, it seems, is entirely immune to the many temptations of power.
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Mohsin Hamid
At a café table in Lahore, a bearded Pakistani man converses with a suspicious, and possibly armed, American stranger. As dusk deepens to night, he begins the tale that has brought them to this fateful meeting.
Changez is living an immigrant’s dream of America. At the top of his class at Princeton, he is snapped up by Underwood Samson, an elite firm.
For a time, it seems as though nothing will stand in the way of Changez’s meteoric rise to personal and professional success. But in the wake of September 11, he finds his position in his adopted city suddenly overturned. And Changez’s own identity is in seismic shift as well, unearthing allegiances more fundamental than money, power, and perhaps even love.
Elegant and compelling, Mohsin Hamid’s second novel is a devastating exploration of our divided and yet ultimately indivisible world.
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Janette Turner Hospital
In this powerful and achingly beautiful novel, Janette Turner Hospital tackles head-on questions of national security, art, terrorism and love.
From the moment Leela’s ear catches the first few bars of music in between the roar of subway trains, she’s entranced by its haunting beauty. Letting the music reel her in, in perfect fifths, it’s at the end of the inbound platform that she finds Mishka Bartok, singing Che farò senza Euridice and accompanying himself on the violin. He’s surrounded by a cluster of commuters, but hardly seems to notice they are there until he stops playing. Their connection is immediate, and that night they embark on a steamy love affair.
With this compelling re-imagining of the Orpheus story, Janette Turner Hospital again shows her genius, interweaving a literary thriller with a story of passion and the triumph of decency in confusing and dangerous times. It is at once a love story on a grand scale that spans America, Australia and the Middle East, and an exploration of how ghastly side effects of terrorism can wreak havoc on individual lives.
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David Malouf
In this stunning collection, internationally acclaimed writer David Malouf gives us bookish boys and taciturn men, strong women and wayward sons, fathers and daughters, lovers and husbands, a composer and his muse. These are their stories, whole lives brought dramatically into focus and powerfully rooted in the vividly rendered landscape of the vast Australian continent. Malouf writes about men and women looking for something they seem to have missed, or missed out on, puzzling over not only their own lives but also the place they have come to occupy in the lives of others.
This single volume gathers both a new collection of Malouf's short fiction, Every Move You Make, and all of his previously published stories.
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