Praiseworthy

‘I’m awed by the range, experiment and political intelligence of Alexis Wright’s work. She is vital on the subject of land and people.’ Robert Macfarlane, New York Times Book Review

‘Monumental. Praiseworthy blew me away. If you think you know what assimilation is, you should read Praiseworthy and think again.’ Tony Hughes-d’Aeth, Australian Book Review

‘The rich interrelations of ancestral spirits, larger-than-life characters, and Country all derive from the Aboriginal traditions of storytelling. But there are also signs of literary influence from every compass point on the map, including, most notably, the surrealism and magic realism of writers such as Jorge Luis Borges and Gabriel Garcia Marquez.’ Jack Cameron Stanton, The Age

‘Praiseworthy is Alexis Wright’s most formidable act of imaginative synthesis yet . . . A hero’s journey for an age of global warming, a devastating story of young love caught between two laws, and an extended elegy and ode to Aboriginal law and sovereignty.’ Jane Gleeson-White, The Conversation

Praise for Carpentaria: ‘A magisterial yet colloquial voice which transforms the oral tradition of the country's indigenous people into a swirling narrative spiked with burlesque humor and featuring a huge cast of eccentric characters.’ New York Times Book Review

‘The great Moana Jackson declared the doctrine of discovery a legal fiction. In Praiseworthy, farce, satire, tragedy, the colloquial, myth, pun, repetition, elegy, and the epic expose the absurdity of the doctrine and the everyday lies, habits and horrors keeping it in place. Praiseworthy is simply astonishing.’ Judges of the 2023 Queensland Award for Literary Fiction

‘Linguistically commodious, panoramically plotted, Praiseworthy’s 700-plus-page scale would have given Henry James a heart attack: it is a baggy monster, and more monstrous than most. Its vision is dark, humour tar-black, narration irrepressible, language roiling and rococo. All life, as in Balzac, is here … Wright gives us the living and the dead, material and non-material, Country and people; all the masters dreamed of, and all they neglected to; the entire human (and non-human) comedy … Long after the lesser concerns of contemporary fiction have ceased to matter, the work of Alexis Wright will remain.’ Declan Fry, The Guardian

‘Playful, formally innovative, multi-storied, allegorical, protean and dizzyingly exhilarating, it is long, lyrical and enraged – James Joyce crossed with Gabriel García Márquez, Jorge Luis Borges, Bruce Chatwin and Arundhati Roy … the warm, salty, imaginatively beautiful narrative voice draws you in.’ The Spectator

'Some books you have to simply let happen to you. Alexis Wright’s Praiseworthy is one such book...Wright has written something which is often funny, heartbreaking and politically doesn’t hold back' The Skinny

‘The layering of time and the riot of language are Wright’s great themes and raw materials, and in Praiseworthy – the most ambitious and accomplished Australian novel of this century – they twist and shimmer, doomed forever to their violent pas de deux.’ Samuel Rutter, New York Times Book Review

‘A mind-altering experience: Praiseworthy retaught me how to read.’ Astrid Edwards, Times Literary Supplement

‘An extraordinary novel … which reveals an Australia where myth and reality meet.’ Chris Power, BBC Open Book

‘Incandescent, polyphonic, free-wheeling ... This immersive epic marks a decisive stand. It suggests what would be lost were assimilation to succeed: vital knowledge for the future of humankind gleaned from the “biggest library in the world – country”. Yet its anguished elegy is offset by a confidence in survival, born of a long view of tens of thousands of years.’ Maya Jaggi, The Guardian