RaveThe Guardian (UK)A brilliant, creative hybrid of life writing, feminist polemic and literary criticism, which upends the way we read ... Funder’s narrative is a stylistic mosaic, which draws on skills developed in her previous books ... A dashing addition to a genre of books that bring out of obscurity the women (and occasional man) behind famous writers and artists.
Ann Patchett
RaveSydney Morning Herald (AUS)Patchett is too forthright and ironic to gush...but she is open-hearted and fun ... She scatters biblical references and moral lessons through the book in a way that is humane rather than dogmatic or saccharine. Most are lessons for herself, hard-earned from experience ... Patchett knows how to build quiet tension into the everyday, finding extraordinary moments that change everything ... These Precious Days is the perfect title for the book’s shifting moods of nostalgic and urgent joy, sharpened by the shadow of death.
Charlotte Wood
RaveThe Guardian (UK)...[a] playful and moving feminist fairytale ... Wood has wisely not tried to outdo her own shock tactics. The Weekend, her sixth novel, returns to the qualities that had already built an admiring readership for her earlier books while being a more domesticated sister to its wild predecessor ... more Big Chill than Handmaid’s Tale, with a dash of Big Little Lies and an echo of Atwood’s The Robber Bride. Wood uses the classic theatrical set-up of a house party to concentrate tension in a tight space. If she were Agatha Christie this would lead to murder, but her characters’ emotional blow-ups are closer to those in David Williamson’s Don’s Party or Rachel Ward’s recent film Palm Beach ... Behind the laughs there is deep humanity, intellect and spirituality, qualities that mark The Weekend as much more than old-chook lit ... The Weekend is a novel about decluttering and real estate, about the geometry of friendship, about sexual politics, and about how we change, survive and ultimately die. Wood has captured the zeitgeist again, with a mature ease that entertains even as it nudges our prejudices.
Michelle de Kretser
PositiveThe Sydney Morning Herald (AUS)De Kretser must have had fun, and difficulty, selecting quotations to illustrate her admiration. They succeed at \'giving readers unmediated access to [Hazzard’s] prose\'\' ... I especially enjoyed de Kretser’s unpicking of Hazzard’s technical skills, from vocabulary and syntax to naming characters, often invisible to general readers except in their effects.
Anne Tyler
RaveThe Sydney Morning Herald (AUS)Redhead’s small dramas are both moving and comforting in our time of greater crises. Tyler’s detailed observation of human behaviour shaped by social change is an anthropological study. Her characters are recognisable and her dialogue casually revealing ... Tyler will have readers examining their own lives for missed opportunities and dodged mistakes. If there’s a flaw in this sweet story it is the suggestion that we’re all swimming like salmon towards the norm of family life. But Tyler doesn’t lay out rules or simple answers. Her writing is so expertly nuanced and honest that she carries us into these fictional strangers’ lives as if they really matter.
