The Yield

August Gondiwindi returns to her grandfather's property in rural New South Wales for his funeral — and finds a mining company is about to destroy the land. Her grandfather has left behind a dictionary of Wiradjuri words — a lifetime's work of language preservation — and the novel moves between August's present, her grandfather's dictionary entries, and the journal of a 19th century missionary. Three timelines, three voices, one argument: that language is land, that to lose the words is to lose the country, that the dictionary is an act of resistance as important as any legal challenge. Won the Miles Franklin Award.