Literary prizes may be sometimes controversial and almost never agreed upon, but they do direct readers to books that are highly recommended by a select group of readers - here are 20 literary prize winners to get stuck into over the summer break.

Too Much Lip by Melissa Lucashenko

Winner of the Miles Franklin Literary Award 2019

Wise-cracking Kerry Salter has spent a lifetime avoiding two things - her hometown and prison. But now her Pop is dying and she’s an inch away from the lockup, so she heads south on a stolen Harley. Kerry plans to spend twenty-four hours, tops, over the border.

She quickly discovers, though, that Bundjalung country has a funny way of grabbing on to people. Old family wounds open as the Salters fight to stop the development of their beloved river. Gritty and darkly hilarious, Too Much Lip offers redemption and forgiveness where none seems possible.

The Erratics by Vicki Laveau-Harvie

Winner of the Stella Prize 2019

When Vicki Laveau-Harvie’s elderly mother is hospitalised unexpectedly, Vicki and her sister travel to their parents’ isolated ranch home in Alberta, Canada, to help their father. Estranged from their parents for many years, Vicki and her sister are horrified by what they discover on their arrival.

A ferocious, sharp, darkly funny and wholly compelling memoir of families, the pain they can inflict and the legacy they leave, The Erratics has the tightly coiled, compressed energy of an explosive device – it will take your breath away.

The Glad Shout by Alice Robinson

Winner of the Readings Prize for New Australian Fiction 2019

After a catastrophic storm destroys Melbourne, Isobel flees to higher ground with her husband and young daughter. Food and supplies run low, panic sets in and still no help arrives. To protect her daughter, Isobel must take drastic action.

The Glad Shout is an extraordinary novel of rare depth and texture. Told in a starkly visual and compelling narrative, this is a deeply moving homage to motherhood and the struggles faced by women in difficult times.

The Five: The Untold Lives of the Women Killed by Jack the Ripper by Hallie Rubenhold

Winner of the Baillie Gifford Prize 2019

Polly, Annie, Elizabeth, Catherine and Mary-Jane are famous for the same thing, though they never met. They wrote ballads, ran coffee houses, lived on country estates, they breathed ink-dust from printing presses and escaped people-traffickers. What they had in common was the year of their murders: 1888.

Their murderer was never identified, but the name created for him by the press has become far more famous than any of these five women. Now, in this devastating narrative of five lives, historian Hallie Rubenhold finally sets the record straight, and gives these women back their stories.

An American Marriage by Tayari Jones

Winner of the Women’s Prize for Fiction 2019

Newlyweds, Celestial and Roy, are the embodiment of both the American Dream and the New South. He is a young executive and she is an artist on the brink of an exciting career. They are settling into the routine of their life together, when they are ripped apart by circumstances neither could have imagined. Roy is arrested and sentenced to twelve years for a crime Celestial knows he didn’t commit.

An American Marriage is a masterpiece of storytelling, an intimate look into the souls of people who must reckon with the past while moving forward - with hope and pain - into the future.

Ducks, Newburyport by Lucy Ellmann

Winner of the Goldsmiths Prize 2019

An Ohio mother bakes pies while the world bombards her with radioactivity and fake facts. She worries about her children, caramelisation, chickens, guns, tardigrades, medical bills, environmental disaster, mystifying confrontations at the supermarket, and the best time to plant nasturtiums. She regrets most of her past, a million tiny embarrassments, her poverty, the loss of her mother, and the genocide on which the United States was founded.

But in Lucy Ellmann’s scorching indictment of American barbarity comes a plea for kindness. Ducks, Newburyport is a heresy, a wonder, and a revolution in the novel. It is also unforgivably funny.

Celestial Bodies by Jokha Alharthi (translated by Marilyn Booth)

Winner of the Booker International Prize 2019

Celestial Bodies is set in the village of al-Awafi in Oman, where we encounter three sisters: Mayya, who marries Abdallah after a heartbreak; Asma, who marries from a sense of duty; and Khawla who rejects all offers while waiting for her beloved, who has emigrated to Canada.

These three women and their families witness Oman evolve from a traditional, slave-owning society slowly redefining itself after the colonial era, to the crossroads of its complex present. Elegantly structured and taut, Celestial Bodies is a coiled spring of a novel, telling of Oman’s coming-of-age through the prism of one family’s losses and loves.

Girl, Woman, Other by Bernardine Evaristo

Co-winner of the Booker Prize for Fiction 2019

Teeming with life and crackling with energy, told through many distinctive voices, this novel follows the lives of twelve very different characters. Mostly women, black and British, they tell the stories of their families, friends and lovers, across the country and through the years.

Joyfully polyphonic and sparklingly contemporary, Girl, Woman, Other is a gloriously new kind of history, a novel of our times - celebratory, ever-dynamic and utterly irresistible.

The Testaments by Margaret Atwood

Co-winner of the Booker Prize for Fiction 2019

More than fifteen years after the events of The Handmaid’s Tale, the theocratic regime of the Republic of Gilead maintains its grip on power, but there are signs it is beginning to rot from within. At this crucial moment, the lives of three radically different women converge, with potentially explosive results.

As Atwood unfolds The Testaments, she opens up the innermost workings of Gilead as each woman is forced to come to terms with who she is, and how far she will go for what she believes.

Supper Club by Lara Williams

Winner of the Not the Booker Prize 2019

Twenty-nine year old Roberta has spent her whole life hungry - until the day she invents Supper Club. Supper Club is a secret society for hungry women. Women who are sick of bad men and bad sex, of hinted expectations to be thinner, smile more, talk less. So they gather at night to feast and drink and dance, seeking the answer to a simple question: if you feed a starving woman, what will she grow into?

This is a story about the hunger that never goes away. It is a story about friendship, food and female rage. Above all, it is about the people who make us who we are - who lead us astray and ultimately save us.

The Overstory by Richard Powers

Winner of the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction 2019

An artist inherits a hundred years of photographic portraits, all of the same doomed American chestnut. A hard-partying undergraduate in the late 1980s electrocutes herself, dies, and is sent back into life by creatures of air and light. A hearing- and speech-impaired scientist discovers that trees are communicating with one another. An Air Force crewmember in the Vietnam War is shot out of the sky, then saved by falling into a banyan.

This is the story of these and five other strangers, each summoned in different ways by the natural world, who are brought together in a last stand to save it from catastrophe.

No Friend but the Mountains by Behrouz Boochani (translated by Omid Tofighian)

Winner of the National Biography Award 2019

In 2013, Kurdish journalist Behrouz Boochani was illegally and indefinitely detained on Manus Island. This book is the result. Written on a smuggled mobile phone and translated from Farsi, it is a voice of witness, an act of survival. A lyric first-hand account. A cry of resistance. A vivid portrait through six years of incarceration and exile that - against all the odds - became an award-winning national bestseller.

Released this month, Boochani travelled to New Zealand on a temporary visa at the invitation of the WORD festival in Christchurch.

Invisible Women by Caroline Criado Perez

Winner of the Royal Society Science Book Prize 2019

Award-winning campaigner and writer Caroline Criado Perez shows us how, in a world largely built for and by men, we are systematically ignoring half the population. She exposes the gender data gap – a gap in our knowledge that is at the root of perpetual, systemic discrimination against women, and that has created a pervasive but invisible bias with a profound effect on women’s lives.

From government policy and medical research, to technology, workplaces, urban planning and the media – Invisible Women exposes the biased data that excludes women. In making the case for change, this provocative book will make you see the world anew.

Click Here for What We Do by Pam Brown

Winner of the Australian Literature Society (ALS) Gold Medal 2019

Click Here for What We Do is a cluster of four loosely connected poems that are not only sceptical of the status quo’s serial mendacities and hype but, in a way, they also attempt a coming to terms with the erosion of the idealistic conditions that once made non-mainstream culture, including poetry, so viable and, even, necessary.

Spurning any lofty design these poems debug the absurdities of contemporary materialism with surreptitious humour. Though disquiet is present it’s usually temporary. Here, thinking about the future can be ‘trickgensteinian’ and yet Pam Brown’s poems offer a circumspect optimism.

Drive Your Plow Over the Bones of the Dead by Olga Tokarczuk (translated by Antonia Lloyd-Jones)

Winner of the Nobel prize for Literature 2019

Drive Your Plow Over the Bones of the Dead takes place in a remote Polish village, where Duszejko, an eccentric woman in her sixties, recounts the events surrounding the disappearance of her two dogs. When members of a local hunting club are found murdered, she becomes involved in the investigation.

This subversive, entertaining noir novel, by ‘one of Europe’s major humanist writers’ (Guardian), offers thought-provoking ideas on our perceptions of madness, injustice against marginalised people, animal rights, the hypocrisy of traditional religion, belief in predestination-and getting away with murder.

Underland by Robert Macfarlane

Winner of the Wainwright Prize Golden Beer Prize 2019

From the vast underground mycelial networks by which trees communicate to the ice-blue depths of glacial moulins, and from North Yorkshire to the Lofoten Islands, Robert Macfarlane traces a voyage through the worlds beneath our feet. He reaches back into the deep history of the planet, through the layers of rock and ancient buried objects, and forward to the future, the legacy of the anthropocene and the world we bequeath our descendants.

Underland is Macfarlane at his dazzling best - the lyrical, the political and the philosophical come together in this profound exploration of the relationship between landscape and the human heart.

Say Nothing by Patrick Radden Keefe

Winner of the Orwell Prize for Political Writing 2019

One night in December 1972, Jean McConville, a mother of ten, was abducted from her home in Belfast and never seen alive again. Her disappearance would haunt her orphaned children, the perpetrators of the brutal crime and a whole society in Northern Ireland for decades. Through the unsolved case of Jean McConville’s abduction, Patrick Radden Keefe tells the larger story of the Troubles.

A gripping story forensically reported, Say Nothing explores the extremes people will go to for an ideal, and the way societies mend - or don’t - after long and bloody conflict.

Friday Black by Nana Kwame Adjei-Brenyah

Winner of the 2019 PEN/Jean Stein Book Award

Friday Black tackles urgent instances of racism and cultural unrest, and explores the many ways we fight for humanity in an unforgiving world. In the first, unforgettable story of this collection, ‘The Finkelstein Five’, Adjei-Brenyah gives us an unstinting reckoning of the brutal prejudice of the US justice system. In ‘Zimmer Land’ we see a far-too-easy-to-believe imagining of racism as sport. And ‘Friday Black’ and ‘How to Sell a Jacket as Told by Ice King’ show the horrors of consumerism and the toll it takes on us all.

Fresh, exciting, vital and contemporary, this outstanding fiction debut is for anyone looking for stories that speak to the world we live in now.

The Rúin by Dervla McTiernan

Winner of the Davitt Award for Adult Crime 2019

Galway 1993: Young Garda Cormac Reilly is called to a scene he will never forget. Two silent, neglected children - fifteen-year-old Maude and five-year-old Jack - are waiting for him at a crumbling country house. Upstairs, their mother lies dead. Twenty years later, a body surfaces in the icy black waters of the River Corrib. At first it looks like an open-and-shut case, but then doubt is cast on the investigation’s findings - and the integrity of the police.

Cormac is thrown back into the cold case that has haunted him his entire career - what links the two deaths, two decades apart? The Rúin draws us deep into the dark heart of Ireland and asks who will protect you when the authorities can’t - or won’t.

The Lost Man by Jane Harper

Winner of the Ned Kelly Award for Best Fiction 2019

The man lay still in the centre of a dusty grave under a monstrous sky.

Two brothers meet at the stockman’s grave, a landmark so old, no one can remember who is buried there. But today, the scant shadow it casts was the last hope for their middle brother, Cameron.

Something had been troubling him. Did Cameron choose to walk to his death? Because if he didn’t, the isolation of the outback leaves few suspects…For readers who loved The Dry and Force of Nature, Jane Harper has once again created a powerful story of suspense, set against a dazzling landscape.