[a] beautiful and austere tale… written in lush, languid prose, filled with beautiful sentences and turns of phrase, this is one of the most enjoyable books I have read this year

Romantic obsession and sexual intrigue meet in the sumptuous historical melodrama

An austere love story, probably my favourite of his novels

Mishima is the Japanese Hemingway

This tetralogy is considered one of Yukio Mishima's greatest works. It could also be considered a catalogue of Mishima's obsessions with death, sexuality and the samurai ethic. Spanning much of the 20th century, the tetralogy begins in 1912 when Shigekuni Honda is a young man and ends in the 1960s with Honda old and unable to distinguish reality from illusion. En route, the books chronicle the changes in Japan that meant the devaluation of the samurai tradition and the waning of the aristocracy.

Mishima's novels exude a monstrous and compulsive weirdness, and seem to take place in a kind of purgatory for the depraved

Magical

Craig Silvey's much-awaited second novel is very different from the elegiac Rhubarb - but it's every bit as good, if not better... Deeply thoughtful, remarkably funny and playful.

Craig Silvey's Rhubarb was one of my favourite Australian novels of 2004 and heralded a major new voice in Australian literary fiction. His next offering in Jasper Jones is another beautifully constructed book with a page-turning narrative and outrageously good dialogue.

Jasper Jones is a riveting tale, studded with laugh-out-loud and life-affirming moments yet underpinned by a clear-eyed examination of human weaknesses and misdemeanours.

Silvey's story of a claustrophobic Australian mining town and two of its native, naïve sons is suspenseful, charming and very readable indeed

Jasper Jones confronts inhumanity and racism, as the stories of Mark Twain and Harper Lee did ... Silvey's voice is distinctive: astute, witty, angry, understanding and self-assured.

Beautifully written and one of the great Australian books of the year

Not since reading John McGahern's That They May Face The Rising Sun have I come across a novel which so surely places the lives of its characters in the context of their landscape; but whereas with McGahern that landscape was local, intimate, and rewarding to those who worked it well, Patrick Lane's land is wild and barren, unforgiving, and populated by a scarred and hunted people.
Red Dog, Red Dog is a shock of a novel; immaculately crafted, deeply thoughtful, and with a broken-hearted wisdom about the ways in which damage can fall through the generations. There is little to celebrate in the world these characters inhabit, but much to admire about the way Lane has revealed it to his readers. A work of great and unconsoled love

scenes are finely drawn and convincing.

Sinister, shocking and extremely powerful

Wonderful

Her writing is always thrilling and this is much more than simply a page-turner

A successful novel, well made and written with a light touch

It is beautifully written, and elegantly edited, and manages to pack in vivid characterisations built on tragic family histories... With its strong structure and interesting themes, it could be a textbook example of how to write a modern novel

Satisfying death-blow to place-in-the-sun escapism

A compelling novel

A wry family black comedy, a study in revenge, and an unlikely, if sinister, thriller...a characteristically intelligent, well constructed narrative... The prose is precise and fluent, the tone is neutral, and Tremain makes effective use of the fact that many adults remain children

A criss-crossing, sinuous tale of muted passion and sibling rivarly - and affection - set in the Cevennes. Its peculiar, particular atmosphere is conjured perfectly

A haunting and perfectly poised tale of incest and antiques.

Creepily affecting

Chilling and vivid

Surely one of the most versatile novelists writing today... The scene-setting opening is languorous and beautiful, giving full rein to Tremain's descriptive gifts... A disturbing tale and one rich in detail

Intriguing

Tremain expertly heightens the tension in a cleverly fashioned and astutely observed novel that reads like a cross between Ruth Rendell and Jean de Florette

Tremain's extraordinary imagination has produced a powerful, unsettling novel in which two worlds and cultures collide

Tremain writes about this part of France so well because she has known it since childhood, and she captures a sensuality in the landscape that is both attractive and eerie... It is an enthralling book about the catastrophic disruption honesty can bring

The novel has all the formal structure of a medieval morality tale, along with its traditional dichotomies: rus and urbe, avarice and asceticism, chastity and lust

Rose Tremain's thrilling Trespass is set in an obsure valley in Southern France... To be read slowly; Tremain's writing is too exquisite to hurry

Timeless but rooted; tangible but otherworldly. Meticulously plotted, with the musty sadness that comes of cleaving to the past, Trespass will reward your reading time

Rose Tremain's novel begins with a scream and barely loosens its grip amid the sumptuously written pages that follow...subtly harnesses the stifling heat and dangerously feral landscape of southern France to unspool a psychologically disconcerting story of family skeletons and outsider tensions

Like a sinister edition of A Place In the Sun directed by Alfred Hitchcock, with the depth and subtlety that make the book far more than a mere thriller