It is this characteristic opposition which makes The Great World a truthful portrait of Australia. Sufferings and wrongs abound, but there is no dullness.

An example of how fiction may still be individual, honest and humanly truthful. Malouf's great talent is precisely for unmasking the epic or world-historical - for finding the human backing to history's all reflecting mirror

Lucid and accessible. His most ambitious book so far

A truthful portait of Australia

A book of great stature with moral force and moral truth

'A superb fictional debut, impossible to read without grinning or grimacing'

'Superb short stories...Coen's pitch-perfect ear for American demotic is on proud display. His fascination with people who talk but never listen - and the lingustic impasse that results when they get together - is almost Beckettian'