The Booker in the Nineties was all big ideas, grand narratives and excess, a decade distilled in book form under the glare of the tabloid press. In some sense this held true as the new millennium rolled over… and it some senses, well, it didn’t at all. As in the rest of life, and culture, the Booker in the Noughties felt more fragmented. More individual stories shining a light on hitherto ignored groups, but with the dominant Bookerati never too far around the corner.

True History of the Kelly Gang is a heavily fictionalized account of the Australian legend of Ned Kelly, a national icon to many, a “horse-thief and murderer” to others. Set in late nineteenth century Victoria, in a rural landscape north-east of Melbourne, it covers Kelly’s life from childhood through through his apprenticeship with notorious bushranger Harry Power, to infamy with his brother and two friends as the “Kelly Gang”, culminating in a dramatic shootout with the gang clad in “ironman” costumes.

After the Seventies saw the Booker taking its tentative first steps, stumbling here and there, occasionally landing on a genuine classic but more often than not serving up curiosities rather than solid-gold genius, we venture into more solid ground in the Eighties.

There’s a sense here of more self-awareness, of the need for winners to feel “important” and make a statement of some kind. There are certainly more hits than misses, and even the latter are perhaps in some ways more interesting than those of the previous decade.

Oscar and Lucinda describes the lives of two very different characters whose lives become intertwined when they meet on a long sea journey to Australia in the mid nineteenth century and discover a shared passion for the (then illicit) world of gambling. Oscar Hopkins is a devout Christian, from an evangelical background with a memorably fanatical father, who converts to Anglicanism, which while relatively moderate, still is very much unable to tolerate his increasing addiction to the card table and racecourse. Lucinda Laplastrier is an Australian orphan and heiress who ploughs her fortune into a glass factory. When their paths cross, a mutual love develops between the unlikely pair, but despite them ending up cohabiting, it remains tragically unspoken.