RaveThe Age... the work of an exquisitely talented writer whose inspiration has been yoked to a more developed sense of novelistic craft ... The narrative here has a more strategic duck and weave. Its structure lies coiled and primed to deliver the inevitable gut punch, and if some of the descriptive passages do resort to overkill (especially early on, where scattershot similes ricochet around at alarming speed) Stuart finds his aim and kills his darlings in short order. Certainly, it’s worth enduring passages that can seem a bit rich when Stuart is so attuned to imagining the realities of the poor ... One of the outstanding qualities Young Mungo shares with its predecessor is a penetrating focus on the textures and psychology of grinding poverty. Few writers can write about them with such luxuriousness as Stuart, and you might be tempted to think of him as an Alan Hollinghurst from the wrong side of the tracks ... There’s an incandescent vividness to his portrayal of characters shaped and shaded by the grime of their experience, and however blighted and horrible they may be, you never get a sense of grotesque or caricature. Quite the opposite. Even the villains in this book are never less than fully human – sometimes more monstrous for their moments of ordinariness or the way they might strike against type ... Stuart can write sentences to die for – his prose is alive, insightful, perfectly poised – and at his best (which is most of the time) he uses his formidable descriptive powers not to wallow in a desperate, violent, impoverished milieu, but to deepen our understanding and imagination of it ... There may be little comfort for a closeted young man struggling to survive in this rough-as-guts Glaswegian hood, but Mungo seizes what he can in secret, and we get the desolating solace of reading this tear-jerker filtered through the prism of Stuart’s gorgeous, incisive and emotionally powerful prose.
Douglas Stuart
RaveSydney Morning Herald (AU)Young Mungo may cover terrain familiar to readers of Shuggie Bain, but it is by no means a clone of Stuart’s first book. For one thing, it’s the work of an exquisitely talented writer whose inspiration has been yoked to a more developed sense of novelistic craft ... The narrative here has a more strategic duck and weave. Its structure lies coiled and primed to deliver the inevitable gut punch, and if some of the descriptive passages do resort to overkill (especially early on, where scattershot similes ricochet around at alarming speed) Stuart finds his aim and kills his darlings in short order. Certainly, it’s worth enduring passages that can seem a bit rich when Stuart is so attuned to imagining the realities of the poor ... There’s an incandescent vividness to his portrayal of characters shaped and shaded by the grime of their experience, and however blighted and horrible they may be, you never get a sense of grotesque or caricature. Quite the opposite ... Stuart can write sentences to die for – his prose is alive, insightful, perfectly poised – and at his best (which is most of the time) he uses his formidable descriptive powers not to wallow in a desperate, violent, impoverished milieu, but to deepen our understanding and imagination of it.
Sunjeev Sahota
RaveThe Sydney Morning Herald (AUS)... hovers with subtle resonance ... Sahota’s gorgeous, subtle novel weaves an effortless tale that explores the complexity of family and belonging and celebrates the liberating power of literature.
Rumaan Alam
RaveThe Sydney Morning Herald (AUS)... a gripping literary disaster novel unleashed from the confines of a middle-class family getaway ... Alam weaves a subtle examination of racial and class privilege as his fine-grained observational social comedy is transformed into creeping horror. The novel was written before the pandemic struck, but the study of crisis psychology makes it feel eerily of the moment.
Tomasz Jedrowski
RaveThe Sydney Morning Herald (AUS)This gay romance between two Polish boys living under Communist rule is as grand and gorgeously written, as passionate, as shot through with melancholy as anything by Edmund White or Alan Hollinghurst ... Swimming in the Dark is bound to become a queer literary classic, and its rather sweeping political dimension breaks new ground in the genre.
James McBride
RaveThe Sydney Morning (AUS) HeraldMcBride’s novel teems with life and hundreds of characters. In prose that is restless, inventive, almost compulsively alive, the plot unfolds full of serendipity and tangential humour. It ricochets through urban misery with a sense of community as divine comedy, in a way that reminded me of the transcendent New York sections from Don De Lillo’s Underworld.
Anna Burns
RaveThe Sydney Morning HeraldThis brilliant and unsettling novel from Irish author Anna Burns is a shaggy dog story – digressive, full of oddball incident and intellectual whimsy ... Milkman is compelling contemporary Irish fiction, canvassing dark material and difficult themes through a vivid, smart and loquacious narrative voice.
