The yield A novel

Tara June Winch

Book - 2020

"Knowing that he will soon die, Albert 'Poppy' Gondiwindi takes pen to paper. His life has been spent on the banks of the Murrumby River at Prosperous House, in the fictional Australian town of Massacre Plains. Albert is determined to pass on the language of his people, the indigenous Wiradjuri tribe, and everything that was ever remembered by the ancestors. He finds the words on the wind. August Gondiwindi has been living in Europe for ten years when she learns of her grandfather's death. She returns home for his burial, wracked with grief and burdened with the memories of life in poverty before her mother's incarceration, her hometown's racism against her people, and the mysterious disappearance of her sister... when they were kids that changed August's life forever. 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, she endeavors to save their land - a quest that leads her to the voice of her grandfather and 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 somewhere "home." It is not just the story of a people and a culture dispossessed, but a joyful reminder of what was and what endures. It is a powerful reclaiming of Indigenous language, storytelling and identity, offering hope for the future."--

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FICTION/Winch Tara
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Subjects
Genres
Domestic fiction
Novels
Published
New York, NY : HarperVia, an imprint of HarperCollins Publishers [2020]
Language
English
Main Author
Tara June Winch (author)
Edition
First Edition
Physical Description
343 pages : map ; 24 cm
ISBN
9780063003460
9780063003477
Contents unavailable.
Review by 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.

From Booklist, Copyright (c) American Library Association. Used with permission.
Review by Publisher's 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)

(c) Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved
Review by 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.

Copyright (c) Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.