The Eye of the Sheep by Sofie Laguna is the winner of the Miles Franklin Literary Award 2015!

First awarded in 1957, the Miles Franklin Literary Award is presented annually to a novel which is of the highest literary merit and presents Australian life in any of its phases. As the winner, Sofie Laguna will receive $60,000 in prize money.

Our reviewer said of the winning book, ‘Sofie Laguna tackles the intricacies of love and marriage, brotherhood, power dynamics, medical issues and the definition of family – her novel is a mixture of the brutality found in Alice Sebold’s The Lovely Bones and the pain in John Green’s The Fault in Our Stars. Equally distressing and uplifting, every moment of pain is juxtaposed with the light we see in the central figure of Jimmy.

This book should be impossibly bleak, but Laguna has managed to imbue it with luminosity. This is a story about how to find your place in the world and how to accept what you have been given. The Eye of the Sheep will break your heart – a small price to pay to hear Jimmy’s story.’ (Read the full review here.)

You can find out more about the Miles Franklin Literary Award here.