Australian novels of recent decades, canonical and lesser-known works, created by both Indigenous and non-indigenous writers, have been telling stories the nation and its readers have not wanted to hear for most of Australia’s colonial history. While novelists did engage, prior to the 1980s, with Indigenous presence on the continent, such engagement was sporadic and mostly peripheral to grander stories of pioneering bravado, white achievement and the battle with nature on the frontier. Now, peripheral stories have moved to the centre, for Australia was not an empty land settled peacefully by the British. The land was already occupied by sovereign nations of people. Storied, sung place was invaded with orchestrated violence; the land was taken, not ‘taken up’. Indigenous peoples now demand that their ‘ancient sovereignty’ be allowed to ‘shine through as a fuller expression of Australia’s nationhood’ via constitutional amendment and treaty. Read against the backdrop of relatively recent developments – land rights, the Mabo decision, Stolen Generations, History Wars – this chapter examines work by non-indigenous authors like Kate Grenville and Andrew McGahan as well as Indigenous writers such as Alexis Wright and Tara June Winch, in tracing the rise of the postcolonial novel in Australian fiction.

This chapter provides a critical overview of how Sub-Saharan Francophone Africans have engaged with the form of the novel from the period of decolonization to the first decades of the new millennium. It is meant for readers new to the Sub-Saharan Francophone novel and for those needing an updated overview of the major periods and authors that have brought visibility and coherence to the field. It is organized chronologically to combine classic literary historiography and highlights for each period landmark publications, thematic continuities, and formal innovations. It also offers contextual insights underscoring the specificity of novelistic production in a variety of African postcolonial situations. In each case these developments follow the imperative to represent African realities within a language—and often literary models—imposed by a colonial power: France. The chapter offers an updated reassessment of previous literary historiographies, insisting not only on formal considerations, but also on the evolution of the cultural status of the African novel across periods and in various literary markets. It includes a final section on contemporary ‘turns’ which further expose some of the recent developments, both formal and sociological, that have contributed to the most spectacular refashionings of novelistic production in the twenty-first century.