'Pat Conroy's is the most articulate and commanding voice to speak for and from the south since Thomas Wolfe'

'Tremendous depth, intricacy and compression...a novel about virtues we neglect to our diminishment: courage, brotherhood and victory over the difficult obstacles to authentic manhood'

'A work of enormous power, passion, honour and wisdom'

'Gripping, gruelling...superb'

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.