A powerful, impressive book

David Malouf is one of Australia's most esteemed writers... Malouf often works on a broad canvas, portraying places, people and events in the panoramic context of history... [and] evoking the elusive interior worlds of his characters' perceptions

[A] remarkable book, in which the realist and the dreamer are finally and excitingly fused

A meditation, in the form of a novel, on the connection between life and art, by a talented Australian writer

Perfect for the festive holiday, a story of love and romance and a Christmas Eve wedding gone wrong . . . Great fun

This miraculous volume of selected letters provides a moving and revelatory portrait of the famed author of Slaughterhouse-Five and Cat’s Cradle. . . . Fans will find the collection as spellbinding as Vonnegut’s best novels, and casual readers will discover letters as splendid in their own way as those of Keats.

A laughing prophet of doom

Unimitative and inimitable social satirist

A satirist with a heart, a moralist with a whoopee cushion, a cynic who wants to believe

Splendidly assembled and edited

Unique

Kurt Vonnegut never regarded himself as a great writer. But he did possess that undervalued gift of charm, of sociability. There are authors we admire or envy, but there are just a few we really, really love, and Vonnegut is one of them.

[Reveals] Vonnegut’s passions, annoyances, loves, losses, mind and heart . . . The letters stand alone—and stand tall, indeed. . . . Vonnegut’s most human of hearts beats on every page

A well-rounded collection of letters

[The letters] have a directness and a consistency, a scruffy but ensnaring humanity… Kurt seems by turns kind, engaged, imaginative, witty, self-deprecating (“I write with a big black crayon… grasped in a grubby, kindergarten fist,”) and – on various fronts – courageous

Crisply edited... There was something fundamentally goodhearted about Vonnegut. For all his gloom and cantankerousness, he never entirely lost his faith in human nature.