[Billy] may be the best first novel by a black author since Toni Morrison The Bluest Eye in 1969.

It challenges comparison with some of the world's most bizarre masterpieces

Patrick White is, in the finest sense, a world novelist. His themes are catholic and complex and he persues them with a single-minded energy and vision

Like all first-class comedians, he is deadly serious

In his major postwar novels, the pain and earnestness of the individual’s quest for ‘meaning and design’ can be felt more intensely than perhaps anywhere else in contemporary Western prose

An antipodean King Lear writ gentle and tragicomic, almost Chekhovian . . . an intensely dramatic masterpiece.