Beautiful and heroic...Every passage merits attention and gives satisfaction

One of the greatest magicians of fiction ... White's scope is vast and his invention endless

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

The outstanding figure in Australian fiction

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.