Alice Hoffman is simply brilliant

A moving, poignant, powerful tale about love, death, friendship and family... Blue Diary gently gets under your skin. You'll be hooked

Alice Hoffman writes quite wonderfully about the magic in our lives

Like her contemporaries, Carol Shields and Alice Munro, Hoffman has an acute eye for detail... Hoffman writes with heartbreaking clarity

Honest, shattering, seductive, and ultimately healing, Blue Diary is an unforgettable novel by a writer who tells "truths powerful enough to break a reader's heart"

I have rarely encountered a work that has moved me as strongly-extraordinary

Compelling power...tenderness and perceptiveness

Deeply impressive...powerful

Compassionate... This is a serious, honest novel

This is one of her best... it contains all the elements we love from her books: a hint of magic, love and personality

Gripping and moving, it has a touch of magic that will keep you turning the pages

Tender... Deeply memorable

Its richness of prose is evocative

It is every inch the assured and stunning debut that everyone suggests

Wyld is a languorous writer with great skill in characterisation...will delight

This is a young writer with talent to burn

Told with quiet, characterful poise, the noel succeeds in evoking not only Australia's epic geographical landscape, but its literary terrain too summoning echoes of some of that country's finest writers,

This is a highly accomplished first novel. Evie Wyld is not a show off writer. She has a clean, clear prose style which is exactly right in the service if her story, and the best ear for dialogue in a long time.

Wyld's debut novel dissects the misery that seeps inexorably from one generation to the next

Wyld can write very well, in a vivid descriptive style reminiscent of Tim Winton's.

Wyld's superb skills at portraying a hot, dusty landscape and her psychological insight will pull you inexorably in.

Superb assured first novel about fathers and sons. Pitch-perfect prose

A very impressive first novel. Wise and wry, it uses its Australian bush setting to great effect, Wyld's protagonists fleeing there from wars, both literal and familial. She writes great characters and makes you love them as she nails them.

This is a sad yet beautiful story of fathers and sons, their wars and the things they will never know about each other

Cleverly metafictional, humorously perverse, and impressively original