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

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.