This book is great! Would definitely recommend. Thanks so much to NetGalley and the publisher for the ARC.

"yield, bend the feet, tread, as in walking, also long, tall -- baayanha. Yield itself is a funny word -- yield in English is the reaping, the things that man can take from the land, the thing he's waited for and gets to claim. A wheat yield. In my language it's the things you give to, the movement, the space between things. It's also the action made by Baiame because sorrow, old age and pain bend and yield."

The historical and linguistic layers of TJW's didactic narrativizing is quite stunning. In this project, she doesn't only intend to imagine a story in the lives of her ancestors and the land that's been pirated from them by colonialism, but also to recover a lexicon. It goes without saying that recovering a dictionary is more than simply recovering denotations but to remember and transmit cultural invaluable wisdom. The novel contrasts the action of the yield between cultures: one as violent extraction of entitled resources and another of a symbiotic give and return that honors the will of the land itself. In it, a grandfather's death impels a lexicon, or a cultural map, to flow out starting from the end ('z') and going to the beginning ('a') in many ways reflecting on how nothing ever dies, and that life only perpetuates in continuous beginnings. It is a rejection of extraction signifying the killing of the land, but a reflection on how the land, like people, orders itself into self-sustenance.

I think the church missionary letters that weave through the novel serves to present perspective that constantly negotiates between ally and colonizer in the early age of European settlement in Aborigines land. It provides a historical tracker for the erasure of a people and their culture, but the charity it provides is never self-aware enough to realize it savior complex and therefore is complicit in the "massacre". If there was more of a point than simply a historical tracker to give a bit of background on how the Aborigines people of Massacre Plains were ripped from the world they knew and forced to assimilate, I may have missed it. I'm not sure that voice needed to be that of Christian missionaries.

And of course, the backdrop of derricks and government stolen land being auctioned off to oil companies, though now seems quite tropy, may be necessary for historical accuracy? Not sure. All in all, the structure of the novel was complex and the narrative thoughtfully layered.

I finished reading #TheYield by Wiradjuri author @tara_june_winch. If you don’t know very much about the true history of Australia then you could do no better than to read this extraordinary novel - already a big hit & prize winner in Aus and soon to be published here in the UK later this summer. The novel beautifully weaves three narrative threads together to rebuild and reclaim ideas about home, identity and language. It’s a tender, haunting but hopeful read that stays with you and keeps you thinking. Australian fiction is producing some incredible voices and stories right now!

I love Australian fiction, and The Yield is no exception. This is a book about the power of ancestry and tradition. It's a book about the power of culture and what it means when a culture is threatened with erasure. I found this book to be both complex and profoundly moving.

Many thanks to NetGalley, the author, and the publisher for providing me with a copy of this book. All thoughts are my own.

This is an emotional read about August's return home from across the world after the death of her grandfather. When her grandfather's home is about to be repossessed by a mining company, she begins an emotional journey into his past and what it means for her and her future.

The Yield is an incredible book about Indigenous language and identity in Australia. Told in three alternating perspectives, Winch weaves together the voices of Albert “Poppy” Gondiwindi, his granddaughter August, and a German Lutheran missionary Reverend Greenleaf. Towards the end of his life, Poppy decides to write the language of his people and through this language pass down his own story and history. After learning of his passing, August returns from the other side of the world to find that her family home is going to be repossessed by a mining company. And in the past, we follow Reverend Greenleaf as he writes about the early colonial period.
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This is an amazing book that layers the study of language, the story of a grieving family reclaiming their land, and the dispossession of Indigenous language and culture together. It’s beautifully written and the alternating perspectives are so cleverly done as they intersect throughout the story. Each providing context to the other and enriching the whole reading experience. It’s one of those books that will remain with you after you turn the last page. I know I’m still thinking about it now. It’s also a very timely read and one that even if you’re not an Australian reader, you’ll still find that it’s incredibly relevant.

This is one the best written novels I have read in a long time. The cultural importance and unconventional structure made for a highly readable story that traces roots of intergenerational trauma and the decline of native populations to colonization and racism. With three storylines; interconnected but not in traditional ways; we follow August, an indigenous woman, in modern day who returns home to Australia from Britain to pay her final respects to the grandfather that raised her. Her grandfather Albert Gondiwindi tells his story through the dictionary of Wiradjuri words is writing and defining. The third, an unexpected for me was the Missionary who comes to the Massacre Plains area to build a missionary and tells the story through his letters of what occurred in the 18th century.

This story is so good and I hope it makes its way into the US readers hands because they will see striking similarities between indigenous populations in Australia and the US.

I’m judging a 2020 fiction contest. It’d be generous to call what I’m doing upon my first cursory glance—reading. I also don’t take this task lightly. As a fellow writer and lover of words and books I took this position—in hopes of being a good literary citizen. My heart aches for all the writers who have a debut at this time. What I can share now is the thing that held my attention and got this book from the perspective pile into the read further pile.
If I’m honest I found the direct address and the initial construct… the point of telling of the novel a bit hokey and distracting… “I must write this all down…” but BUT I stuck around because I sensed something epic was around the corner. I enjoyed this passage on the following page:
“At the answering of the phone and the breaking of the news, she felt something dark and three-dimensional fall out of her body, something as solid as a self. She’d become less suddenly. She knew she’d felt that exact same way before, though she didn’t feel tears coming the way they burn the face and blur the eyes. Her face instead was cold to the touch, her heart rate lowered, her eyes dry and her arms, chicken-skinned and thin as kindling, began to start a fire. She took the newspaper from the mail tray, took the crate of wood and knelt in the corner of the common kitchen. She spread the newspaper out, smoothing the pages with the side of her fist and held the hatchet and the cypress in each hand.”

Interesting and thought provoking. I found the language-indigenous difficult to follow at times; but it added to the depth and breath of the novel. The language is rudimentary and spare like an abstract painting, full of interpretations and hidden meanings. I enjoy books like this, that have an unusual form and use language as character to drive the plot. I look forward to reading other books by this Author.

Thank you NetGalley & Harpervia for the opportunity to read and review this delightful book!

janne boswell
https://seniorbooklounge.blogspot.com/

Very emotional read. Well written, paced, and structured, this story tells the story of a woman returning to old but new land and learning how to navigate that.