The following are some titles of 2017 reviewed by The Sydney Morning Herald, The Australian, Australian Book Review (magazine). While the year comes to its festive season, we celebrate the diversity of books and reading. We’d like to share all those inspirational literature stories with you in a few separate posts and wish you a safe and lovely festive season.

Past & precent Miles Franklin winners, here is a list of authors catch reviewers attention in 2017:

Atlantic Black by A S Patric – a haunting novel set on an ocean liner crossing the Atlantic to Europe during WWII and it examines the damage of war and the generational impact of trauma.

Time Capsule by David Ireland (Hardie Grant), a strange and enlivening collection of “verse observations”, the three-time Miles Franklin winner, who turns 90 in August.

Passage of Love by Alex Miller – Sitting in a New York park, an old man holds a book and tries to accept that his contribution to the future is over. Instead, he remembers a youthful yearning for open horizons, for Australia, a yearning he now knows inspired his life as a writer. Alex Miller is magnificent in this most personal of all novels filled with rare wisdom and incisive observation.

The Life to Come by Michelle de Kretser – a mesmerising novel about the stories we tell and don’t tell ourselves as individuals, as societies and as nations. It feels at once firmly classic and exhilaratingly contemporary.

That Deadman Dance by Kim Scott – It’s about a group of Noongar people who try to return to country, an odyssey complicated by a taboo: it’s a massacre site where their forebears were murdered. It’s a book after Taboo.

A New England Affair by Steven Carroll – 1965. The great poet, TS Eliot, is dead. Hearing the news, the seventy-two year old Emily Hale points her Ford Roadster towards the port of Gloucester, where a fishing boat will take her out to sea, and slips between past and present, reliving her life with Eliot.

Choke by Sofie Laguna – Abandoned by her mother as a toddler and only occasionally visited by her volatile father who keeps dangerous secrets, Justine is raised solely by her Pop, an old man tormented by visions of the Burma Railway. Sofie Laguna, winner of the 2015 Miles Franklin Award once again shows she is a writer of rare empathy, originality and blazing talent.

More to come…