A complete list of Miles Franklin Award winners

Inspired by the uninhabited “ghost cities” of China, Siang Lu weaves together multiple narratives from across time, including the story of the young Xiang, who is fired from his translator job at Sydney’s Chinese Consulate after it’s discovered he’s been relying on Google Translate. An imaginative novel that draws on Chinese history to explore the absurdity of modern life and work.

Buy Ghost Cities from Dymocks, QBD Books or Amazon

In a small town, a crazed visionary seeks the solution to the climate crisis and the economic dependency of the Aboriginal people, his wife seeks solace from his madness and repatriation for her Aboriginal/Chinese family, and their children battle disparate demons of their own.

Buy Praiseworthy from Dymocks, QBD Books or Amazon

Cinnamon Gardens Nursing Home in Sydney is a safe place for its residents who all carry their own histories, secrets, triumphs and failings. But the neighbourhood is not without its prejudices, and some challenge the residents’ existence. The devastating consequences force everyone to reckon with a country divided.

Buy Chai Time at Cinnamon Gardens from Dymocks, QBD Books or Amazon

An intimate saga of one woman’s turbulent life as her quiet, small-town existence is interrupted by an unexpected Facebook message. What happens when buried stories are dragged into the light?

Buy Bodies of Light from Dymocks, QBD Books or Amazon

Erica Marsden’s son has been imprisoned. In her grief, Erica retreats to a quiet hamlet near the prison where he is serving his sentence, and obsesses over creating a labyrinth by the ocean. To build it, she will need to trust strangers and reckon with her past.

Buy The Labyrinth from Dymocks, QBD Books or Amazon

Knowing he will soon die, Albert ‘Poppy’ Gondiwindi, who has spent his life by the Murrumby River at Prosperous House, is determined to pass on the language of his people. August Gondiwindi has been living overseas for a decade when she learns of her grandfather’s death. She returns home to learn that Prosperous House will be repossessed by a mining company, and she endeavours to save their land.

Buy The Yield from Dymocks, QBD Books or Amazon

Kerry has spent her life avoiding her hometown and prison. But with her Pop close to death and prison even closer, she heads south on a stolen Harley to Bundjalung country, intending to stay a short while and instead staying to grapple with old wounds, a new fella, and a river in trouble.

Buy Too Much Lip from Dymocks, QBD Books, or Amazon

Writer Pippa longs for success. Celeste wants to believe her feelings for her married lover are reciprocated. Ash makes strategic use of his youth in Sri Lanka while ignoring a childhood tragedy. An exploration of how the past and future can distort the present.

Buy The Life to Come from QBD Books or Amazon

Professor Frederick Lothian moves himself into a retirement village. Surrounded by the debris of his life, he is determined to be miserable, but his neighbour helps him realise the damage done by accumulating secrets and lies.

Buy Extinctions from Dymocks or Amazon

During a hot Melbourne summer, Jovan, a cleaner at a hospital, must clean graffiti left behind from increasing acts of violence. The words dislodge stories from his past, of how he and his wife fled Sarajevo, and the death of their children.

Buy Black Rock White City from Dymocks, QBD Books, or Amazon

Jimmy Flick is not like other kids. His mother, Paula, is the only one who can manage him and keep him out of his father’s way. But when Jimmy’s world falls apart, he has to make things right and navigate an unfathomable world alone.

Buy The Eye of the Sheep from Dymocks, QBD Books, or Amazon

Jake Whyte lives in an old farmhouse on an island, a place of rain and wind. But something comes for her sheep every night. Is it foxes? A stranger in the forest? Or is it Jake’s past, held in the scars that stripe her back, breaking through?

Buy All the Birds, Singing from Dymocks, QBD Books, or Amazon

Laura traverses the world before returning to Sydney to work for a publisher of travel guides. Ravi longs to be a tourist but is driven from Sri Lanka by devastating events. Around these characters are woven more enthralling narratives of people, places and stories.

Buy Questions of Travel from Dymocks, QBD Books, or Amazon

When Hitler comes to power, a group of friends and lovers become outlaws overnight and flee the country. Dora, her lover, her younger cousin Ruth and her husband. London provides refuge until a chilling act of betrayal tears them apart. Decades later, Ruth must make peace with the ghosts of her past.

Buy All That I Am from Dymocks, QBD Books, or Amazon

Bobby Wabalanginy never learned fear until he was a grown man. He grew up doing the Dead Man Dance, but for him, it was a dance of life for people to do together.

The story of a fledgling Western Australian community in the early 1800s. A story which shows first contact did not have to lead to war.

Buy That Deadman Dance from Amazon

Inspector Stephen Villani stands in the bathroom of a luxury apartment where a young woman lies dead, a panic button within reach. Over a sweltering summer, the certainties of Villani’s life crumble.

The sequel to Peter Temple’s The Broken Shore.

Buy Truth from Dymocks, QBD Books, or Amazon

Paramedic Bruce Pike is called out to deal with a teenage adventure gone wrong. He knows what happened and how, because thirty years before, that dead boy could easily have been him.

Buy Breath from Dymocks, QBD Books, or Amazon

You can stream the Breath movie now on Apple TV

One summer morning in 1970, a Melbourne suburb is pronounced one hundred years old. As the suburb prepares to celebrate, suburban life continues on for residents Rita, Michael, Mulligan and Mrs Webster – loss, love, past and future in a time of change.

Buy The Time We Have Taken from QBD Books, or Amazon

On the Gulf country of north-western Queensland, a precariously settled coastal town is home to battling factions and a diverse group of residents – outcasts, zealots, activists, and families.

Buy Carpentaria from Dymocks, QBD Books, or Amazon

It’s the early 1800s, and of the few free settlers of Botany Bay, no one has ventured far inland. Until the escape of Desmond Kale, Irish political prisoner, and the vengeance of his rival, magistrate Matthew Stanton.

Buy The Ballad of Desmond Kale from Dymocks, QBD Books, or Amazon

Following his father’s death, William is sent to an unknown uncle who lives in the decaying ruins of Kuran Station, where secret histories lay. There, his uncle’s demons and mother’s desperations settle on the shoulders of the young boy who no-one realises is sick and getting worse.

Buy The White Earth from Dymocks, QBD Books, or Amazon

A love story set in the immediate aftermath of the Second World War. A soldier and a young girl struggle to reclaim their humanity in a new world where they must reinvent their lives and learn to dream again.

Buy The Great Fire from Dymocks, QBD Books, or Amazon

After a betrayal by her husband, Annabelle Beck retreats to tropical North Queensland and her old family home. There, Bo Rennie, of the Jangga tribe, tells her he holds the key to her future and together they set out on a path of recovery, only to uncover secrets that challenge their happiness.

Buy Journey to the Stone Country from Dymocks, QBD Books, or Amazon

Forty-year-old Georgie Jutland is a mess. Stuck with a man she doesn’t love and two kids who’ll never call her ‘Mum’, her days are filled with domestic tedium and social isolation. Then, one morning, she sees a shadowy figure on the beach – Luther Fox, a loner and outcast who brings danger in his wake.

Buy Dirt Music from Dymocks, QBD Books, or Amazon

Edith Campbell Berry arrived in Geneva determined to right the world’s wrongs. That was five years ago. Her work and marriage no longer anchor her as they once did, and reuniting with her lover provides only a fleeting joy as World War II advances inexorably.

Buy Dark Palace from Dymocks, QBD Books, or Amazon

Drylands is a dying town where townsfolk live harsh, violent lives. Janet Deakin sells papers to the lonely locals, and at night works on a novel for a world where no-one reads. A dark portrait of outback Australia in decline.

Buy Drylands from Dymocks, QBD Books, or Amazon

In Western Australia, Indigenous man Harley is the result of his white grandfather’s attempts to breed the ‘first white man born’. But pulled between history, family and self, Harvey wants to be a failure.

Buy Benang from Dymocks, QBD Books, or Amazon

In western New South Wales, Holland plants hundreds of gum trees on the property he lives on with daughter Ellen. When she is 19, he tells her she will marry the man who can name every species of eucalyptus.

Buy Eucalyptus from Dymocks, QBD Books, or Amazon

In 1837 ex-convict Jack Maggs has returned illegally to London from Australia, enthralled by the notion of a gentlemanly class, but consequently learns he must shed his false consciousness to understand his destiny lies in Australia.

Buy Jack Maggs from Dymocks, QBD Books, or Amazon