Miles Franklin Award 2011 shortlist

It's only two months away from the Miles Franklin Award announcement and the 2011shortlist promises a good read over the last remaining days of the Easter holiday break for those fortunate to have time off work and a copy of one of these books in their hands, if the judges' remarks are any indication.
Congratulations to the authors.

When Colts Ran is an epic tale, and one never quite knows what to expect of it. Only the thrill of the venture is predictable. So it is apt that McDonald should open with a quote from Shakespeare’s A Midsummer Night’s Dream: ‘Ready. And I. And I. And I. Were shall we go? Where indeed’.
The novel follows Kingsley Colts, as he cycles through a life of initial rebellion, adventure, misadventure, aspiration and disillusion.

That Deadman Dance, a powerful and innovative fiction that shifts our sense of what an historical novel can achieve. Its language is shaped by the encounter of Noongar and Australian English, producing new writing and speech.
Its central character occupies both indigenous and settler worlds, and yet is contained by neither. Its narration of the early contact of British colonisers, American whalers and the indigenous Noongar people on the south coast of Western Australia in the early nineteenth century is both historical and magical.

As the Spanish Flu epidemic is sweeping Australia, Sergeant Quinn Walker returns home from the Great War to face the ghosts of his past. Ten years before he had fled his far-flung Australian country town, accused of an unspeakable crime. Unable to show himself, he hides in the bush and secretly visits his dying mother.