Mendes writes with an ease, boldness and clarity of focus… undeniably a gifted story-teller.

A fresh, vigorous voice which sustains a bleak, moving and often funny narrative.

(reviewing Drift Street)

Mendes takes us on a journey through the vulnerabilites of love, weaving through the fears that come with giving and receiving it.

(reviewing A Race Across Burning Soil)

The first sentence is ‘I want to tell you a joke.’ When it appears many times more in the first few chapters, it becomes irritating. By the end of the book, ‘I want to tell you a joke’ is as calming as the repetitive crash of waves on the ocean shore.

(reviewing The Curtain Raiser)

How many writers would be organised enough to know before they started a novel the precise date that they would finish it?

A powerful novel; shocking, poetic and real.

(reviewing Drift Street)

A powerful story of youthful obsession, class differences and the power of dreams, written in a terse, tangible and self-confident fashion.

(reviewing A Race Across Burning Soil)

This is a marvellous book, one of those novels, in fact, which makes you want to contact the author upon finishing it to thank them for being such a decent person.

(reviewing The Curtain Raiser)

She sets deadlines and writes five pages a day … she maps out her characters’ destinies on a graph.

A lively, imaginative, unerringly focused novel about a battler family skilled at survival.

(reviewing Drift Street)

Patrick and Sheila are classically “ordinary” characters made extraordinary by the power of fiction … a very Australian story of two modern battlers bound together by that web of mixed emotions known as Love.

(reviewing A Race Across Burning Soil)

Dark, poignant, funny, at times unbearably sad. But it is never depressing. The reader will laugh and cry with every page.

(reviewing The Curtain Raiser)