The yield : a novel / Tara June Winch.

Enhanced descriptions from Syndetics:

Winner of the 2020 Miles Franklin Literary Award and 2021 Kate Challis RAKA Award!

"A beautifully written novel that puts language at the heart of remembering the past and understanding the present."--Kate Morton

"A groundbreaking novel for black and white Australia."--Richard Flanagan, Man Booker Prize winning author of The Narrow Road to the Deep North

A young Australian woman searches for her grandfather's dictionary, the key to halting a mining company from destroying her family's home and ancestral land in this exquisitely written, heartbreaking, yet hopeful novel of culture, language, tradition, suffering, and empowerment in the tradition of Louise Erdrich, Sandra Cisneros, and Amy Harmon.

Knowing that he will soon die, Albert "Poppy" Gondiwindi has one final task he must fulfill. A member of the indigenous Wiradjuri tribe, he has spent his adult life in Prosperous House and the town of Massacre Plains, a small enclave on the banks of the Murrumby River. Before he takes his last breath, Poppy is determined to pass on the language of his people, the traditions of his ancestors, and everything that was ever remembered by those who came before him. The land itself aids him; he finds the words on the wind.

After his passing, Poppy's granddaughter, August, returns home from Europe, where she has lived the past ten years, to attend his burial. Her overwhelming grief is compounded by the pain, anger, and sadness of memory--of growing up in poverty before her mother's incarceration, of the racism she and her people endured, of the mysterious disappearance of her sister when they were children; an event that has haunted her and changed her life. Her homecoming is bittersweet as she confronts the love of her kin and news that Prosperous is to be repossessed by a mining company. Determined to make amends and honor Poppy and her family, she vows to save their land--a quest guided by the voice of her grandfather that leads into the past, the stories of her people, the secrets of the river.

Told in three masterfully woven narratives, The Yield is a celebration of language and an exploration of what makes a place "home." A story of a people and a culture dispossessed, it is also a joyful reminder of what once was and what endures--a powerful reclaiming of Indigenous language, storytelling, and identity, that offers hope for the future.

Reviews provided by Syndetics

Publishers Weekly Review

This angry, elegiac tale of an aboriginal family from Indigenous Australian writer Winch (After the Carnage) explores the charged meaning of the word Ngurambang, meaning country or home in the Wiradjuri language. Albert Gondiwindi, facing a terminal illness, begins writing the story of his Wiradjuri family in the town of Massacre Plains. Upon his death, his granddaughter August, who had moved to England to get away from the town, returns for the funeral. After August learns the family's home, an old mission station, will be destroyed to make way for a mine, she decides to stay, determined to save the home and land around it. Meanwhile, the reader learns that Wiradjuri artifacts have long since been excavated and removed, along with other brutal details chronicled in letters written by Reverend Greenleaf, the missionary who started the school in the late 19th century. Albert, Greenleaf, and August narrate alternating sections: Greenleaf's long letter describing mission history is heavily expository, while August's section is where the plot lives, and it's enlivened by dialogue with her family. The strongest chapters are from Albert, in narratives framed as dictionary entries of his ancestors and their disappearing culture. While the shifts in narrator interrupt the flow, Winch succeeds at contextualizing August's story with cultural history. The result is often quite moving. Agent: Pamela Malpas, Jennifer Lyons Literary Agency. (June)

Booklist Review

August Gondiwindi returns to her Australian hometown for her grandfather Albert's funeral. She had left Prosperous, a former missionary town, years before, following her older sister's disappearance. She finds her grandmother prepared to leave their house to make way for a tin-mining company that has taken over the land; the family can't claim ownership of the land despite having lived there for centuries. August grapples with her connections to Australia as an Indigenous woman, and with her own history of loss and trauma. Winch unravels the Gondiwindi family history through August's narrative, August's grandfather's native-language dictionary entries, and the letters of 1915 missionary Reverend Ferdinand Greenleaf. Through their perspectives, Winch illustrates the long history of colonization and erasure of Indigenous culture in Australia. The unique structure draws readers close while grounding the novel in history. Already a best-seller in Australia, Winch's second novel is a clear-eyed look at the experiences of native people and the ways in which history is inherited through generations.

Kirkus Book Review

An Aboriginal woman uncovers her heritage, and her painful past, to save her family's home. August Gondiwindi, a dishwasher in London, receives word that her grandfather Poppy Albert has died and knows she must return to Massacre Plains, the small Australian town her family has lived in for generations--a place she hasn't visited in years: "Go back full with shame for having left, catch the disappointment in their turned mouths, go back and try to find all the things that she couldn't find so many thousands of kilometres away." She arrives at the family farm, Prosperous House, and as she helps her grandmother Elsie prepare food and clean for the large collection of aunts and uncles gathering for the funeral, she runs into former classmates and old flames and wrestles with her long-dormant grief at the disappearance of her sister, Jedda, who vanished when August was 9 and Jedda, 10. She also discovers that this may be the last time she sees her childhood home--her grandmother will soon be forced out of Prosperous House because a company plans to open a large tin mine on the land. Interwoven with August's story are two other narrative strands: a lengthy letter from the Rev. Ferdinand Greenleaf, who founded the mission that eventually became Prosperous House to "build a home of safety for the poor waifs and strays," and sections from a dictionary Poppy Albert was compiling of their family's native language before his death, which includes words from the author's ancestral Wiradjuri language. Albert's entries are easily the most charming parts of the book. "The dictionary is not just words--there are little stories in those pages too," he writes, and the same is true for his own effort, which weaves in reminiscences of meeting Elsie, fond memories of raising Jedda and August, and stories from his ancestors. But August's chapters suffer from a lack of clarity; it's often difficult to understand why events are significant, especially in the novel's more dramatic latter half. Too often, it's simply that the sentences are bewildering: "When the previous evening, like a virus, the true rumour that Rinepalm Mining had set an open day at the town hall filtered into the Valley, and back streets, the men and women, though on the edge of heatstroke, leapt from their houses and headed into town." A story woven from profound, overlooked historical material that's sadly marred by sloppy execution. Copyright (c) Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.