![\"Compassion](\"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-content\/uploads\/2025\/07\/391.jpg\")
<\/p>\nAll dull awards shortlist books that are alike; every important award recognises books that are remarkable in their own way. This is what makes them worth paying attention to, what makes following them fun \u2013 and this year\u2019s Miles Franklin award shortlist is no exception. All six books hail from different publishers. Each book is markedly different in genre, style and form.<\/p>\n
The self is an uncertain site in all these books \u2013 one where concepts like nationhood, sexuality, class and ethnicity are negotiated. There is a portrait of coming-of-age and Tongan community, a bawdy historical novel told by a self-styled horse thief, and an interlinked short-story cycle that turns on the omens and aftershocks of a serial killing. And three very different novels of ideas playfully reference other texts (as well as themselves) \u2013 and draw attention to how they are made.<\/p>\n
Notably, Fiona McFarlane\u2019s Highway 13 is the first work of linked stories to be shortlisted for the prize, which is awarded to \u201cthe novel of the highest literary merit\u201d. But the shortlist is not, curiously enough, diverse in length: none of the entries break 400 pages, though Burruberongal writer Julie Janson\u2019s Compassion comes close.<\/p>\n
Chinese Postman by Brian Castro<\/p>\n
\u201cI was never good at philosophy,\u201d quips Abraham Quin, Chinese Postman\u2019s occasional narrator. After being humiliated by his philosophy tutor at university, he learns to see himself in the third person as well as the first, to move \u201ceasily between the two\u201d. This gives us the basic shape of Castro\u2019s narrative, which takes the form of a series of ruminations, in either Quin\u2019s voice or a close third-person perspective.<\/p>\n
So: philosophy\u2019s out. Quin is also \u201cthrough with all that novel-writing\u201d. Despite this protest, Castro\u2019s book is best described as a philosophical novel or a novel of ideas. Chinese Postman is largely plotless, though Quin\u2019s email correspondence with a Ukrainian woman named Iryna Zar\u0119bina gives it a flexible spine.<\/p>\n
Quin has a penchant for maxims, particularly when their content is scatological. \u201cShit\u201d, in his telling, is \u201ca symptom of lowly creation\u2019s failure to survive as gods\u201d. It is, for him, a substance \u201cwithout hierarchy\u201d, in which \u201cAll are equalised\u201d.<\/p>\n
Reflections of this kind are Quin\u2019s way of \u201ccomposting\u201d \u2013 rather than composing \u2013 his thoughts. For those who read for the sheer delight of allusive, tricky, irreverent sentences, Chinese Postman will be the most exciting work on the shortlist.<\/p>\n
Compassion by Julie Janson<\/p>\n
Compassion is the shortlist\u2019s only realist historical novel. Set between the years 1836 and 1854, it is a story of maternal reconciliation and paternal reckoning told largely from the point of view of a Darug woman named Duringah, who escapes abuse and traverses Darkinjung and Awabakal country (as well as the country of many other clans and nations) in order to return home.<\/p>\n
Compassion is a sequel: it continues the dramatised life story of Janson\u2019s ancestors from her 2020 novel, Benevolence, which centred on Duringah\u2019s (now-estranged) mother, Muraging. In turning to Duringah, who takes up the alias Eleanor James, Compassion flirts with conventions drawn from an array of literary and popular genres, including colonial romance, revisionist history, melodrama and the picaresque.<\/p>\n
Duringah outwits and eludes colonial authorities with palpable glee. But Compassion has its heartfelt scenes, too. Duringah\u2019s arrival at a mission station, where Koori women sing a church hymn, serves as the occasion for a moment of reverence and some of Janson\u2019s best writing.<\/p>\n
Their voices, \u201cpure like bells\u201d, summon memories of \u201csinging the country with a corroboree\u201d. Yet this memory culminates in a plea for quiet, lest their songs become a \u201cbeacon for vengeful white men\u201d. This tension \u2013 between the desire to speak up, and the risks of doing so \u2013 lies at the heart of Janson\u2019s truth-telling project.<\/p>\n
Dirt Poor Islanders by Winnie Dunn<\/p>\n