Miles Franklin 2025

Abraham Quin is in his mid-seventies, a migrant, thrice-divorced, a one-time postman and professor, a writer now living alone in the Adelaide Hills. In The Chinese Postman he reflects on his life with what he calls ‘the mannered and meditative inaction of age’, offering up memories and anxieties, obsessions and opinions, his thoughts on solitude, writing, friendship and time. He ranges widely, with curiosity and feeling, digressing and changing direction as suits his experience, and his role as a collector of fragments and a surveyor of ruins. He becomes increasingly engaged in an epistolary correspondence with Iryna Zarebina, a woman seeking refuge from the war in Ukraine. As the correspondence opens him to others, the elaboration of his memories tempers his melancholy with a playful enjoyment in the richness of language, and a renewed appreciation of the small events in nature. This understanding of the experience of old age is something new and important in our literature. As Quin comments, ‘In Australia, the old made way for the young. It guaranteed a juvenile legacy.’

The Burrow follows members of the Lee family as they navigate grief and hope in their quiet Australian home: Jin, an emergency physician and father; Amy, a published author and mother; Lucie, their bookish and introverted ten-year-old; and Pauline, Amy’s mother who’s trying to make amends. Racked with grief for Ruby—Lucie’s baby sister who died in a shocking accident—the family adopts a rabbit in the hopes of bringing much-needed cheer to their home. At first, each family member benefits from the distraction of a new and needy creature, but when a violent home invasion breaks their fragile sense of peace, the family is forced to confront the terrible circumstances surrounding Ruby’s death. Atmospheric and tautly lyrical, Melanie Cheng’s slim novel brings together four distinct perspectives—and one wide-eyed rabbit—to reveal the enormity of loss, long-buried family secrets, and how to survive in a newfound world after the ultimate tragedy.A wise and moving story about a family navigating grief, hope, and healing through a bond with a new pet rabbit.Endorsements“How rare, this delicacy—this calm, sweet, desolated wisdom.” — Helen Garner

Ghost Cities — inspired by the vacant, uninhabited megacities of China — follows multiple narratives. One thread follows a young man named Xiang, who is fired from his job as a translator at Sydney's Chinese Consulate after it is discovered he doesn't speak a word of Chinese and has been relying entirely on Google Translate for his work. How is his relocation to one such ghost city connected to a parallel odyssey in which an ancient emperor creates a thousand doubles of himself? Or to a place where a horny mountain gains sentience? Where a chess-playing automaton hides a deadly secret? Or to a tale in which every book in the known empire is destroyed—then re-created, page by page and book by book, all in the name of love and art? Allegorical and imaginative, Ghost Cities intertwines these tales into a dreamlike, allegorical mosaic.Perfect for fans of Haruki Murakami and Italo Calvino.

It's 1986, and 'beautiful, radical ideas' are in the air. A young woman arrives in Melbourne to research the novels of Virginia Woolf. In bohemian St Kilda, she meets artists, activists, students — and Kit. He claims to be in a 'deconstructed' relationship, and they become lovers. Meanwhile, a dismaying discovery throws her work on 'the Woolfmother' into disarray.Theory & Practice is a mesmerising account of desire and jealousy, truth and shame. It makes and unmakes fiction as we read, expanding our notion of what a novel can contain. Michelle de Kretser bends fiction, essay and memoir into exhilarating new shapes to uncover what happens when life smashes through the boundaries of art.Endorsements'A genre-busting inquiry into life and art, youth and Virginia Woolf' — Guardian, Books to Look Forward to 2025'I loved Theory & Practice... raw, funny, truthful, youthful' — Tessa Hadley'Michelle de Kretser is to my mind one of the finest writers alive and Theory & Practice a lightning strike of a book' — Ali Smith

The war broke out and she decided to call her dad. Weeks and weeks they do not speak; the weeks become months and then years.She imagines herself starting this story and how she will tell it later to someone else: ‘We hadn't spoken for years, but then the war broke out...’As conflict plays out across an unnamed region, its inhabitants deal with the fallout. Families are torn apart and brought together. A divide grows between those on either side of the war; compromises are struck as the toll of violence impacts near and far. We learn about those who are left behind and those who choose to leave in a great scattering. As the stories of those affected play out, they weave together to show the whole of a society in the most extreme of circumstances. Even after the last shot is fired, their world will never recover. This powerful novel asks if it’s possible to ever measure the personal cost of war.A captivating literary journey that delves into the intertwined lives of a town, its people, and a region shaped by revolution and war.Endorsements“Like an impressionist painter, Kassab uses words like brushstrokes to build a vivid picture of intertwined lives set against the continuing drumbeat of war. The narrative moves between past, present and future and uses time as an effective device to illustrate how the effects of war linger long after its cessation.” — Books and Publishing

Compassion is the dramatized life story of one of Julie Janson's ancestors, who went on trial for stealing livestock in New South Wales. It is an exciting and violent story of anti-colonial revenge and roaming adventure.A gripping fictive account of Aboriginal life in the 1800s, Compassion follows the life of Duringah, also known as Nell James, the outlaw daughter of the Darug hero of Benevolence, Muraging.

'Islanders must do everything together. We painted ngatu together. We crossed the ocean together. We settled on isles together. We took up Christianity together. We entered into new citizenships together. We became wage workers together. We lived with generations upon generations stacked in fibro houses together. We became half-White together. We got nits together. We sooked together. We stayed poor together. Together. Together. Together.'Meadow Reed used to get confused when explaining that she had grandparents from Australia, Tonga and Great Britain. She'd say she was full-White and full-Tongan, thinking that so many halves made separate wholes. Despite the Anglo-Saxon genetics that gave Meadow a narrow nose and light-brown skin, everybody who raised her was Tongan. Everybody who loved her was Tongan. This was what made her Tongan.Growing up in the heat-hummed streets of Mt Druitt in Western Sydney, Meadow will face palangis who think they are better than Fobs, women who fall into other women, what it means to have many mothers, a playful rain and even Pineapple Fanta.For this half-White, half-Tongan girl, the world is bigger than the togetherness she has grown up in. Finding her way means pushing against the constraints of tradition, family and self until she becomes whole in her own right. Meadow is going to see that being a dirt poor Islander girl is more beautiful than she can even begin to imagine.Dirt Poor Islanders is a potent, mesmerising novel that opens our eyes to the brutal fractures navigated when growing up between two cultures and the importance of understanding all the many pieces of yourself.

Following the interwoven lives of four characters across India, Australia and the United States, the novel takes root in Melbourne and brings its streets, shopping centres and laneways to life with astounding originality—the city may never be the same again.The Degenerates radiates with Titch’s fanaticism and Ginny’s obsessions. Somnath’s devastating history reflects every life divided around the globe. And Maha, the heart of the novel, is an extraordinary creation, an abiding figure of modern salvation. Brimming with vitality, humour, intelligence and brilliant writing, The Degenerates engages with the realities of modern loneliness and every form of departure—from our homes, from our families and even from life itself.In propulsive prose, The Degenerates summons the power of storytelling, disrupts conventional narratives and pays tribute to those lives often lost in the margins.

Two fugitives, a man and a child, drive across a stony desert. As dawn breaks, they roll into an abandoned mine site. They’re exhausted, traumatised and desperate, and this is a forsaken place, but as a refuge it’s the most promising they’ve seen. The child peers at the field of desolation. The man thinks to himself, this could work. Problem is, they’re not alone...So begins a searing, epic journey through a life where the challenge is not only to survive; it’s keeping your humanity if you do.Survival is only the beginning. Juice is a stunning novel for fans of Station Eleven and The Road by twice Booker-shortlisted author Tim Winton.Endorsements"A hold-your-breath adventure set in an utterly plausible, sun-hammered future, Juice will stab your conscience and break your heart." — Emma Donoghue

In 1998, an apparently ordinary Australian man is arrested and charged for a series of brutal murders. The news shocks the nation, bringing both horror and resolution to the victims’ families, but its impact travels even into the past, as the murders rewrite personal histories, and into the future, as true crime podcasts and biopics tell the story of the crimes.Highway Thirteen, Fiona McFarlane’s collection, takes murder as its starting point but unfolds to encompass much. Through the investigation of the aftermath of this violence across time and place — from the killer’s childhood town to Texas, Rome, and tropical northern Australia — McFarlane presents an oblique, entrancing exploration of the way stories are told and spread, and at what cost.What damages, big and small, do these crimes incur? How do communities make sense of such atrocities? How does the mourning of families sit alongside the public fascination with terrible crimes? And can we tell true crime stories without centering the killers?A gripping, enigmatic collection of linked short stories about the reverberations of a serial killer’s crimes in the lives of everyday people.