Truth will out

Or will it? The Miles Franklin award will be announced this Tuesday, 22 June and I’m having a punt on the outcome. I’m going to go for Peter Temple‘s Truth. Okay, I haven’t read it but I haven’t read any of the others on the short list either. I’m going by deduction, my dear Watson. I admire and respect Sonya Hartnett but I don’t think her YA novel Butterfly will be seen as substantial enought to win. I suspect she is on the short list because her large body of work in children’s literature is generally not acknowledged in this country, except in the CBCA awards (she won the very lucrative Astrid Lindgren Memorial Award from Sweden). Craig Silvey won the 2009 Indie Book Award for Jasper Jones but ditto for him although this YA novel is proving very popular. Alex Miller is substantial, though personally I find his novels a bit too consciously literary, but I hear Lovesong is not one of his best (see Angela Meyer’s blog ) and Miller has won the Miles Franklin twice before. I don’t know about The Book of Emmett (but I like the cover): it has had good crits but it’s a debut novel with the dour subject matter of an abusive father and the cost to his children. That leads me via elimination to Truth. I tried to read The Broken Shore after all the good reviews but I didn’t like it. However, after winning a raft of crime writing awards it may be time for Peter Temple to win a literary fiction one. His writing does appear to cross over into the literary and Truth has been universally praised.