The shortlist for this year's Miles Franklin Literary Award was announced at the State Library of New South Wales this morning. The shortlisted titles are:

• The Fern Tattoo (David Brooks, UQP)
• Landscape of Farewell (Alex Miller, A&U)
• Love Without Hope (Rodney Hall, Picador)
• Sorry (Gail Jones, Vintage)
• The Time We Have Taken (Steven Carroll, Fourth Estate)

In announcing the shortlist, the judges noted that all five novels ‘share a preoccupation with problems of time and identity.' ‘Time in these novels is not linear but what Gail Jones called folded and pleated: many of the characters exist in the present but live their lives most intensely in the future or in the past, and often--vicariously--in another place.'

The judges described The Fern Tattoo as ‘a demanding but satisfying book' by an author whose characters ‘are handled with great feeling and depth'; Landscape of Farewell was heralded as ‘a bold venture into perilous literary territory,' in which author Alex Miller succeeds ‘with distinctive panache'; Love Without Hope was described as a ‘lyrical tour de force' which ‘mixes sympathy and savagery ... in a novel that is sometimes song, sometimes nightmare and sometimes black satire' (and the cover too has come in for praise, with the judges declaring the choice of Hieronymus Bosh as ‘entirely apt'); Gail Jones' Sorry ‘explores the themes that readers have come to associate with her distinctive body of work, though now with specific resonance for the on-going work of reconciliation in contemporary Australia'; and Steven Carroll's The Time We Have Taken, the third in a trilogy of novels, was described by the judges as ‘a stand-alone work that is moving and indelible in its evocation of the extraordinary in ordinary lives.'

The winner, who will receive $42,000, will be announced at a gala dinner to be held at the State Library of New South Wales on Thursday 19 June 2008.

This article from Thorpe Bowker's Weekly Book Newsletter and Media Extra is reproduced by kind permission of Thorpe-Bowker, a division of R R Bowker LLC. © Copyright 2008, Thorpe-Bowker

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