The Yield

by Tara June Winch

Overview

Winner of the 2020 Miles Franklin Literary 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.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780063003460
Publisher:	HarperCollins Publishers
Publication date:	06/02/2020
Pages:	352
Sales rank:	340,221
Product dimensions:	6.10(w) x 9.10(h) x 1.50(d)

About the Author

Tara June Winch is the Wiradjuri author of two novels and a short story collection. For her first novel, Swallow the Air, she was named a Sydney Morning Herald Best Young Australian Novelist and received mentorship from Nobel Prize winner Wole Soyinka as part of the prestigious Rolex Mentor and Protégé Arts Initiative. Her second novel, The Yield, won Australia's highest accolade, the Miles Franklin Literary Award. She was born in Australia in 1983 and currently lives in France with her family.

Editorial Reviews

07/06/2020

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)

Publishers Weekly

"A deep and affecting novel, [and] one of the summer's literary must-reads."

Bustle

"The humorous undercurrent to some of Winch’s short stories has no place here, and this is a more serious work than her previous books—but while she may have developed a more sophisticated style, her work is no less vivid, and this is an astonishingly elegant and powerful second novel."

Melanie Kembrey

A work of immense scope and sensitivity. 

Jessie Cole

Winch has built her novel with subtlety and strength. This is a complex, satisfying book, both story and testimony. The Yield works to reclaim a history that never should have been lost in the first place.

The Guardian

I just finished this book and it is ABSOLUTELY extraordinary. Intensely moving, gripping, brutal and yet so full of generosity. I learned so much especially about the lyrical Wiradjuri language. Brilliant. 

Annabel Crabb

The Yield is a bleak and beautiful book that eloquently phrases the weight of history, with an ultimately uplifting sensibility at its heart: that of the power of storytelling across thousands of years. 

Anne Barnetson

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

Kate Morton

The Yield is the work of a major talent. It hypnotises with its lyricism, with the juxtaposition of horror and hope, and the candid look at family, country and history. It’s a work to be savoured, to be enjoyed in the sun on a winter’s day, and then to be shared—as widely as possible!

Madelaine Dickie

Take courage when you read this book. You’ll need it. Winch asks big questions ... Is the answer within us?

Bruce Pascoe

As August navigates her connection to home, to family, and seeks to save what is left of it, the three stories collide in a beautiful ending. The story touches on many types of trauma that have been inflicted on Indigenous Australian’s from the colonization of Australia. Beautifully written, this was a deeply moving story that showed that regardless of the brokenness, the spirit of culture is so much stronger.

ReadWithWine

A lyrical and generous writer, Winch’s prose shimmers through this extraordinary tale of cruelty, dislocation, love and resilience.

Judging Panel for the Prime Minister’s Literary Award

"The Peoples, languages and wildlife of Australia have been purposely decimated for a great many years. The history of this vast land is a tragic one and this young Indigenous author has taken it on in a graceful act of retrieval and witness. The dictionary and use of Wiradjuri words is transporting. Birrabuwawanha—to return, to come back. The Yield is a fine novel, and one not without hope."

Joy Williams

A lyrical, courageous storyteller, Winch redefines Australia in this generational tale of reclamation and hope. 

Sunday Times (London)

Reap the wisdom this book yields.

The Saturday Paper

A groundbreaking novel for black and white Australia.

Richard Flanagan

Nothing short of a landmark Australian novel, simultaneously timeless and yet urgently a story for now, with sentences that’ll knock the wind out of your gut.

Benjamin Law

[A] wily, appealing novel….A testament to the saving grace of language itself, and to the corrosive consequences when it falls out of use and disappears.

Wall Street Journal

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.

Booklist

This is an astonishingly elegant and powerful second novel. 

Louise Swinn

The Yield...is a poignant story of personal and cultural reclamation and survival.

The Australian

The Yield sings up language, history, home, blood - all the important stuff.

Paul Kelly

This is a big hearted, hopeful book. More hopeful, maybe, than we deserve. 

Miles Allinson

The Yield uniquely and powerfully shows how revolutionary a shift from an imported language to an Indigenous language might be ... such aesthetically and ethically ambitious writing. Reap the wisdom this book yields.

Maria Takolander

Winch’s urgent novel is a chance to listen. A moving and evocative story of Aboriginal Australia. Hope shines through this contemporary novel of a culture dispossessed and the importance of preserving language. Winch is a Wiradjuri author and here she writes about the Wiradjuri language which was once thought to be extinct but has now been preserved. The Yield is current, timely and an important must-Read for all Australians. 

Better Read Than Dead Dean

Mesmerising and important.

Melissa Lucashenko

The Yield is a story of hope and preservation

Buzzfeed

"The Yield is, by far, the Australian novel of 2020 that you won’t want to miss."

Book Riot

"A brilliant novel: deeply thought provoking, challenging, intelligent, sophisticated in style, and beautifully written, despite the brutality and sorrow that the history, and narrative, is awash with."

Theresa Smith Writes

It’s another mesmerizing tour de force, throwing a spotlight on Australia’s broken heart. 

Juliet Rieden

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.

Booklist

The humorous undercurrent to some of Winch’s short stories has no place here, and this is a more serious work than her previous books – but while she may have developed a more sophisticated style, her work is no less vivid, and this is an astonishingly elegant and powerful second novel.

The Sydney Morning Herald

[A] wily, appealing novel….A testament to the saving grace of language itself, and to the corrosive consequences when it falls out of use and disappears.

Wall Street Journal

06/12/2020

DEBUT Three distinct narratives bind together Winch's riveting story of Australia's Indigenous people. From the proud patriarch Albert "Poppy" Gondiwindi and his peculiar bilingual dictionary, a haunting history of his ancestors the Wiradjuri comes alive, depicting their lore, their love of the land, their cruel defeat by white settlers, and his punishing days in the Boys' Home after his parents were run off their land. In 1915, the Rev. Ferdinand Greenleaf writes letters to His Excellency the Governor describing white acts of horror he has witnessed but gets not replies. Instead, with Britain at war, Greenleaf is taken to an internment camp for German settlers, where his fierce commitment to the Aborigines earns him extra punishment. Gondiwindi's granddaughter August returns for Poppy's funeral after 10 years in England. Although her arrival brings back painful memories, it also coincides with a mining company takeover of the land. She quickly grasps the importance of her heritage and uses her grandfather's dictionary, Greenleaf's letters, museum records of stolen Aboriginal artifacts, and buried native bones to challenge the company. VERDICT The Aborigines' story is one of yielding, of not taking from the land but of bending to the will of others, a tragic picture of the Australian colonial period. Winch makes a strong statement, beautifully rendered. [See Prepub Alert, 12/2/19.]—Donna Bettencourt, Mesa Cty. P.L., Grand Junction, CO

Library Journal

2020-03-29
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.

Kirkus Reviews

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