Reviews

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

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

(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.
Lara Demasi

(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.
Deborah Hope

(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?
The Canberra Times

A powerful novel; shocking, poetic and real.
Dorothy Hewett

(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.
Nicholas Birns

(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.
Karen Murphy

(reviewing The Curtain Raiser)

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

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

(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.
Fiona Capp

(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.
Lyn Hawgood

(reviewing The Curtain Raiser)