Reviews
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.
Mendes takes us on a journey through the vulnerabilites of love, weaving through the fears that come with giving and receiving it.
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.
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.
A powerful story of youthful obsession, class differences and the power of dreams, written in a terse, tangible and self-confident fashion.
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.
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.
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.
Dark, poignant, funny, at times unbearably sad. But it is never depressing. The reader will laugh and cry with every page.