Editorial reviews

This is a penetrating, fresh look at the indomitable spirit of black pioneers and their descendants.

It's the sweetness of this novel that will melt you, even when it ventures dangerously close to flaming schmaltz, and despite its somewhat predictable (but still satisfying) ending.

If dystopian stories serve as thought experiments, the best ones also function as heart experiments. And with The Divers' Game, Jesse Ball has unsettlingly accomplished both.

Magnificently disorienting and meticulously constructed, Triangulum couples an urgent subtext with an unceasing sense of mystery. This is a thought-provoking dream of a novel, situated within thought-provoking contexts both fictional and historical.

The novel’s depiction of life in this dystopian world is eerie and suffused with symbolic weight.

Readers who appreciate Ball’s keen, melancholic, and often sadly satirical view of human society will likely appreciate this timely assessment of where division might take us and how it affects the generations that come after us.

Uneven and at times frustratingly enigmatic but impressively ambitious and extremely well-written.

It is all about a young woman trying to find who she is and where she is going and what life holds for her.

Gardam’s ability to bring people so fully to life, in such vivid detail, never fails to delight. Such vivid people and dialogue — more than many of her books, I could imagine this as a film.

The Penalty Area is charming, and it’s easy to imagine it being a film. If you need a bookish boost, you can’t go wrong with this story.

Overall, a smart, sharp-eyed, entertaining, engrossing story.

The Black Prince is anything but a grim read. It’s a stylistic pastiche that is far more than a tribute act – as though Roberts has dismantled the clockwork that made Burgess tick and reassembled it in a new form.

The work is original, ambitious and challenging, submerging the reader in the strangeness of an anomalous mind, an aqueous medium where language is refracted into mazes of shifting meanings.