AustLit

'Tom Keneally has been at the game of writing novels for a long time now. Although he has always been an uneven writer, the best of his work is made to last. If 50 years ago his Catholic Church novel Three Cheers for the Paraclete – with a hero who according to legend was based on that dashing and personable priest Edmund Campion – seemed like a thinnish enactment of a bright idea, there had already been Bring Larks and Heroes, which made Keneally look like the natural successor to Patrick White and which is a passionate dramatic work that called out for comparison to The Crucible or Camus’ The Plague.'  (Introduction)

'How strange it is the way the idyll of life in a Tuscan village can animate a literary mind with tall tales and true of a past that is partly gritty realism and partly a dreamt-up extravaganza of the panorama of life on the Italian land, where every beast is a creature of poignancy as well as poetry, but everything lilts like a fairytale even if the smell of the earth is rich with the reek of manure.' (Introduction)

'Every so often someone writes fiction that ravishes the popular imagination. Robert Drewe did it at the outset with The Body surfers in 1983 and Christos Tsiolkas has been doing it in his latest books. Now Drewe has done it again in Whipbird, an absolutely compelling read and also something more.' (Introduction)

'It’s amazing the airs trash fiction gives itself these days. The latest effort by Michael Robotham exploits the neat unstartling idea of a woman who works in a supermarket who steals a newborn baby of a posh woman she befriends. It has plenty of tension and drama but it is so long and so slow moving, so massively preoccupied with the power of its own articulation, that it’s an open provocation to watch Netflix instead.' (Introduction)

'Hinterland is one of those big Australian bush novels in which a group of people – some of them sick, some of them rich and vicious, some of them vassals of the rich or put-upon kids – all collide in a big quasi-political story of grand themes and ideals.' (Introduction)