RaveThe Sydney Morning Herald (AUS)\"There is a remarkable level of compassion and respect that Klein shows her mirror-figure in this book. She does not deal the low blows that would have been easy to land (and the opportunities for which are many), and while she does examine Wolf’s persona, work and life, she is never playing the woman ... Klein’s reckoning, in Doppelganger, is wide-ranging—it leads into explorations and analyses of social media and the public, commodified or branded self that they feed upon; into wellness culture and its ties with conspiracy theorists; big data and big tech; the destabilization of long-told narratives about colonialism, nationhood and identity ... This breadth of material is energising and often surprising in its deployment, and is one of the real pleasures of the book. Klein’s ability to make concrete and personal some of the biggest and most abstract ideas in her critique, too, make Doppelganger a very compelling read.\
Sarah Krasnostein
RaveThe Guardian (UK)What’s most striking about Krasnostein’s dealings with, and portraits of, these people is her compassion ... Even when they are espousing ideas that seem \'unfathomable\' and even offensive, Krasnostein’s project is always to try to understand them and what it might be like to live as they do. In this sense, it is a deeply humanist project, and one that feels timely, too. Krasnostein’s writing is lyrical and stylish, and imaginative in a way that often feels invigorating ... The idea of a composite portrait is ambitious, and it also allows Krasnostein to work with echoes and repetitions, resonances across the text. It’s a poetic structure, and one that works by accrual ... one of the pleasures of the book is noticing the moments in which the stories interweave or chime against each other. It does make for some unevenness, though – not all of the characters or their narratives are as compelling or intriguing as those that really shine here; nor is Krasnostein’s project of understanding able to be achieved equally across them. The fragmentary nature of their telling too can be disorienting or even somewhat dissatisfying, impeding as it does at times a sense of narrative progression within each individual story ... Despite this, The Believer is a fascinating book ... And it is informed always by a sprawling curiosity and deep humanity, which make it an affirming, and deeply moving read.
Charlotte McConaghy
PositiveThe Guardian (UK)...the novel is dreamy, elegiac, often heightened to the register of fairytales or myths; and it is set in a near future, where the effects of climate change have meant that the world’s animal life has almost completely died out ... The Last Migration is something of a hybrid novel, both an adventure story and a piece of speculative climate fiction, constantly slipping between a kind of literary realism and more magical elements, between moments of domestic drama ... McConaghy also structures much of the book and fleshes out her characters according to metaphor ... This all adds to the broody, otherworldly quality of the book’s atmosphere, but it does, at times, begin to feel a bit laboured and mannered – especially as the novel progresses ... aching and poignant.
Josephine Rowe
PositiveSydney Review of Books (AUS)There are elisions, stories narrated in future-conditional tense, a kind of poetic compression that sees days and weeks, whole seasons and whole years stack up against each other, one by one ... There’s a love of language here, of course, but these words and phrases do important work within the stories: they are pivots, sometimes, or time machines, and they’re remarkable for the poetic compression that they allow. They carry histories, and whole relationships, as well as an abundance of charm ... Grief is complex, in these stories, and many-layered, but it’s also handled gently by Rowe: more often than not, it’s hinted at, rather than approached directly, usually the exact nature of the trauma unfolds slowly within the stories, or is kept hidden entirely ... Josephine Rowe’s stories are about beauty, moments of unexpected and lingering magic that interrupt or punctuate the everyday.
