2016 Miles Franklin Literary Award Shortlist

• HOPE FARM by Peggy Frew (Scribe Publications): A quietly powerful and haunting novel, full of the aching intensity of the outcast, rendered in pitch-perfect tone and heartbreakingly believable.

• LEAP by Myfanwy Jones (Allen & Unwin): A beautiful story about the resolution of grief, not by moving on or forgetting, but by finally accommodating, absorbing and accepting its weight.

• BLACK ROCK WHITE CITY by A.S. Patric (Transit Lounge): A fresh and powerful exploration of the immigrant experience and Australian life that explores the damages of war, the constraints of choice, the possibility of redemptive love and social isolation amid suburbia.

• SALT CREEK by Lucy Treloar (Pan Macmillian): This portrait of frontier life is a time-traveller’s delight as it unsettles assumptions about European ‘settlement’ and its devastating effects on Aboriginal culture, while graphically charting the unequal nineteenth-century power relations between men and women.

• THE NATURAL WAY OF THINGS by Charlotte Wood (Allen & Unwin): A confronting story of misogyny that is both shockingly realist in its details and deeply allegorical in its shape.

The winner will be announced at the

Melbourne Writers Festival on 26 August 2016