scribepub's reviews
497 reviews

I found this novel especially affecting and original ... Halloran is a sensitive writer, who brings intellectual ideas about art and science to the page without sacrificing emotional connection. The novel’s intensity and moral complexity reminded me of Colm Toibin’s Brooklyn ... A very impressive achievement. Halloran is in masterly control of her material.
Caroline Baum, Booktopia (Pick of the Month)

Halloran is a first-class storyteller ... A novel about family secrets, told with pace and power.
M.J. Hyland, Author of the Booker-shortlisted Carry Me Down

Halloran’s writing is skilled and intelligent, her characters compelling, and her settings rich … The journey is recognisable but utterly surprising. Insightful and completely absorbing, its resonance lingers.
Rosalie Ham, Author of the bestseller The Dressmaker

Exquisitely drawn and emotionally powerful ... A thought-provoking and original coming-of-age novel.
Cheryl Akle, Better Reading (Pick of the Week)

Exquisite ... A panoramic portrayal of Melbourne in the years after World War II ... Halloran’s gentleness as a writer belies the strength of her worldly wisdom. She does not see the world through rose-coloured glasses. She appreciates its beauty with honesty.
Michael McGirr, The Age

[R]emarkably poetic prose – poetic both because of its rhythmic lyricism and because it so often relies on small details ... The Science of Appearances is a fascinating book, complexly patterned and richly detailed, and particularly adept at building vibrant places – be they Kyneton or St Kilda or Coburg – that feel lived-in and personal. It is keenly interested in the operations of memory, our imaginings of the future and understanding of the past, and the ways in which these things can shift and change across a life. Above all, it is a story about family, in all of its different permutations, and about love – and the kinds of redemption that both of these might offer.
Fiona Wright, Australian Book Review

Jacinta Halloran is one of our finest proponents of moral realism ... Her fine analytical intelligence is matched by compelling, rhythmic prose.
Amanda Lohrey

Skilfully evoked … Halloran has her convincingly drawn and very different characters experience some of the mid 20th century’s most exciting and far reaching movements … a lively, informative novel.
Herald Sun and Adelaide Advertiser

My favourite Australian novel of 2016 is Jacinta Halloran’s elegant and engaging The Science of Appearances ... it celebrates those things that make for a flourishing human life: the love of family, a connection to place, and a feeling of belonging, intimacy, sex, art, science, human endeavour, a sense of purpose, hope in the future, and the capacity for moral judgement.
Peter Mares, ABR Best Books of 2016

A clever, warm and graceful novel ... The Science of Appearances is perfect for those who want to be reminded that change is always possible.
Reading

An evocative story that questions nature versus nurture.
Mindfood

The novel captures the social world of 1950s very well, but it wears its research lightly ... The Science of Appearances is absorbing reading, and it raises all kinds of issues for thoughtful people to discuss.
ANZ LitLovers

Halloran’s prose is elegant—it nicely mirrors the social constraints of the time she’s writing about ... The novel’s strength lies in its evocation of mid-20th century Melbourne and its bohemian arts scene. Halloran’s vibrant descriptions of St Kilda and Carlton offer a pleasant postcard to Melbourne’s past.
Books+Publishing

Halloran is a wonderfully elegant and intimate writer who is enormously gifted in her creation of space and characters. It was a delight to be part of the lives and struggles of these two very different siblings, and watch them as they really came to understand and connect with one another and their new lives ... I enjoyed this book immensely.
Roan Scott, Lip Magazine

A superb observation into the complexities of the human spirit ... Moving on many levels, this is a haunting novel of the choices we make in the pursuit of truth and happiness, a spotlight on the overt social constraints on women and hidden but equally powerful family ties that bind us all. With graceful writing and insightful observations of the human spirit, this is a wondrous read.
Great Escape Books

[Halloran's] knowledge of science underpins the story, but it is her beautiful prose that draws the reader in … [A] lovely portrait of its time.
Sunday Times

The well-made story is back ... The Near and the Far compresses time and space in a way that forces new kinds of utterance. It creates a welcome revealing composite of our place and moment – an array of searching, sweaty, breath-stopping, boldly crafted exchange offerings.
Nicholas Jose, Text

These stories – by some of the region’s brightest stars – burn so compellingly, you can almost feel heat from the pages.
Benjamin Law

This meticulously curated mix of fiction, nonfiction, essays and poetry explore place, culture and identity in luminous and inventive ways ... The anthology attests to the important work that can result from writers immersing themselves in a place so unlike their home, where fresh collaborations are forged and new ways of thinking divulged.
Books+Publishing

A remarkable collection of 21 pieces ... As a bridge between literary spheres, we can only hope it is the first and not the last.
The Australian

What a great pleasure to read such a diverse group of strong writers, working across such a variety of styles. Setting down their truths, while learning others. Their reflections on creative process are an added bonus.
Sophie Cunningham

[An] impressive anthology of stories from Asia Pacific ... a substantial collection of writing [that] would make an excellent teaching text.
The Age and the Sydney Morning Herald

The anthology format presents a unique opportunity to represent diverse authors and literature in meaningful ways ... The Near and the Far travels a long way, literally and figuratively, in achieving this. An ... impressive anthology, sure to stir something powerful in many a reader.
Australian Book Review

The calibre is impressive ... some names will be familiar, others not so much, but all offer an insider's perspective on inhabiting a different world from perhaps one that we're used to ... [a] strong collection.
Thuy On, The Big Issue

All new pieces from both homegrown writers as well as those from the Asia-Pacific, this anthology was borne of reciprocal residencies and cultural events. Poems, vignettes, memoir and non-fiction encompass a wide ambit – from traffic chaos and post-war reflections in Vietnam to gender politics in Bangkok.
Sunday Age, Best Summer Reads

I see [the WrICE program] as a unique opportunity to explore a rich culture that is rapidly modernising, but has ancient roots, through poetry, music and art.
Omar Musa

[The program has] reaffirmed my belief that in order to flourish, Australian literature must be locally grounded, but globally minded ... The fostering of a strong Asia-Pacific writing community, and the exchange of ideas and experiences within that community, is vital to the growth and survival of Australian literature.
Maxine Beneba Clarke

A shimmering, evocative memoir [that is] required reading for anyone interested in contemporary Aboriginal Australia … Position Doubtful opens the heart to understanding.
Books+Publishing

An extraordinary excavation of the relationship, past and present, between settlers and indigenous Australians, deeply grounded in this alluring tract of desert, but with relevance for us all.
The Monthly

Mahood brings a formidable intelligence to her work as a writer and an artist, but also a sly humour here and an almost uncanny talent for observation … By charting these wanderings with such eloquence and scrupulous self-examination, she has created in Position Doubtful a true map of the heart.
The Saturday Paper

[Mahood] is a talented writer whose mastery of the language is absolute. The combination of an artist’s eye, a mapmaker’s precision, and a wordsmith’s playfulness makes for a work of captivating beauty … a significant and timely work.
Weekend Australian

There is something profound about the directness and clarity with which Kim Mahood writes about her art, and her life, in particular her relationship with the land she grew up in and on, and her relationship to the indigenous people who have lived on that land much longer than she. As Mahood writes of — quite literally — building a map that is both geographic, social and cultural, you feel that she has, ever so gently, shifted your view of the world. Position Doubtful is a remarkable, intelligent and mature work. I really loved it.
Sophie Cunningham, Author of Warning: The Story of Cyclone Tracey, Geography and Bird

Position Doubtful attests to an eye that is unfailing and a lifetime of looking … She sees what she sees, and comes to her own conclusions … Powerful.
Australian Book Review

Position Doubtful leaps straight onto the shelf occupied by the great accounts of inland Australia. Theatrical, confessional, masterly descriptive, it is hard to find one word to sum up the achievement. Possibly it lies in the word character: in the brave character of the author herself, and in the spacious, beautiful, and unforgiving character of the Australian landscape and the people who dramatically take on its shape in these pages.
Roger McDonald, Author of Australia’s Wild Places, When Colts Ran, Mr Darwin’s Shooter and The Ballad of Desmond Kale

Kim Mahood is an astonishing treasure: an accomplished artist and writer who is equally well-equipped to navigate both Aboriginal and settler Australia. Her lyrical yet unsentimental memoir is a story of honouring the knowledge that two cultures have mapped upon each other, a lesson the entire globe needs to learn.
William L. Fox, Director, Center for Art + Environment, Nevada Museum of Art

An immersive, emotional and intelligent exploration into the relationship between artist, landscape, and land.
Mindfood

Mahood is a writer of country. Her chapters unfurl like the ribbons of red dunes. She says ‘this is a kind of love story’, and so it is, a love of land, not purchased acreages, but country, birth country. Apart from family and close friends, she says, ‘there has been no other love in my life as sustained as the one I felt for a remote pocket of inland Australia’. Country can get its fingers around your entrails, particularly if it owns them. That grip makes your movements cautious with the knowledge that, while you might move away for a time, the elasticity of your own gut drags you back. Mahood is dragged back. It can be excruciating reading the words of a non-Aboriginal person recording their impressions of a brief visit to Aboriginal community, but Mahood belongs to country and it blesses her with that most refined human sensitivity, doubt. She is not tempted to improve or judge the communities of her country because she prefers to love them; the whole buckled, lovely and jumbled chaos of the land. The rich pulse of country makes the heart quake with recognition. Position Doubtful has the scale and delicacy of desert and records genuine Aboriginal voice and emotion. Its breadth means that it is frequently visited by death but Mahood records those deaths with solemn grace while continuing to rejoice in the vibrance of the land with a calm and dignified joy. A book for people who love this country as if it were their mother.
Bruce Pascoe, Award-winning Author of Dark Emu, Fox a Dog and Convincing Ground

With compassion, wit and elegance, Mahood takes us to a landscape known by white people only as a barren and alien place of no value – except to mine for minerals. She shows us another way to look at it, through the eyes of the traditional owners as well as the perspective of an artist … Position Doubtful suggests a way forward, beyond us-and-them, based on sharing across cultural boundaries.
Rosemary Sorensen, Sydney Review of Books

The beauty of the landscape is explored through … indigenous and kartiya perspectives … astute and compassionate.
Right Now

This is a book for reading and re-reading, a revealing excavation of our place and times, grounded in the desert, but of broad relevance to all Australians who think about our relationship to country, to its Indigenous peoples, to our shared history and to one another.
Kieran Finnane, Alice Springs News

Position Doubtful is entrancing and different; it is poetic, gritty, confronting, and inspiring all at once, and offers a rare and valuable window onto Aboriginal Australia.
Tom Griffiths, Australian Book Review, Best Books of 2016

Sometimes lyrical, sometimes grumpy, sometimes elegiac, but always frank, Position Doubtful ranges across the wide meaning of country, extending past landscape into story, family, history, politics, geology, art, memory, and belonging. It is a vivid and memorable book.
Lisa Gorton, The Age, Best Books of 2016

Position Doubtful probes through layers of understanding of the people and land where she was born, across the Tanami Desert to the East Kimberley; it is rich with insights delivered with sensitivity and honesty.
Susan Lever, Australian Book Review, Best Books of 2016

My book of the year … If anyone’s written more beautifully and modestly about this country and its people I’m not aware of it. I think it’s a treasure.
Tim Winton, The Age, Best Books of 2016

Position Doubtful is delivered with such verve for accuracy that everything seems to have light in it —points of illumination enhanced by the light of the country. And the figure of the author, who often describes herself in the third person, is the guiding light, a pilot on her inland sea. As Mahood modestly maps her terrain, its inner and outer worlds at once fragile, transitory, enduring, Position Doubtful acquires the aura of a classic. A book of extraordinary wisdom and subtlety … the writing is so good that nothing feels forced.
Barry Hill, Sydney Morning Herald

Kim Mahood writes with insight and without condescension of the indigenous community’s struggle to maintain traditions and cohesion in the face of marginal existence, poverty, health problems and rampant alcoholism. [Position Doubtful], despite containing a great deal of death and desolation, is a ringing affirmation of life in all its messy, muddled, half-resolved possibilities.
New Internationalist

In crisp, clear prose Corke confronts the reader with the scenario most of us in Western society are likely to face after a period of declining health and function: ambulance, hospital, unconsciousness, no plan in place, family disagreements about treatment, escalation of medical intervention, and finally, our last days spent ‘‘connected to machines, cared for by strangers, and separated from family’’ … As a manual for how to avoid ending up in the ICU, in what one of Corke’s patients called ‘‘the bad bit at the end’’, Letting Go is a guide book for our age.
Gail Bell, The Saturday Age

We're not very good at talking about death in this country; this book should start a thousand conversations. Now that I've read it, I want to give it to everyone I know.
Annabel Crabb

This is a useful how-to manual for everybody who will at some point face death (which is of course all of us).
Weekend Australian

This tender and thoughtful book calls for an “invisible revolution” in our attitudes to women’s ageing. In a deeply personal meditation Benjamin places body knowledge and luck alongside grieving and family history; intimate reflection with literary exemplar; communion with ghosts sadly close to the painful real. The Middlepause is a wise, lucid and beautiful plea for more candid discussion of the time-wrought transformations of the female body.
Gail Jones, Author of A Guide to Berlin

Both a deeply personal reflection and an elegantly philosophical navigation of the transitions, changes, and challenges of growing older, The Middlepause is written with candour and cosmopolitan wisdom. Benjamin draws on a wide variety of sources from life and literature to illuminate her own experience and amplify its impact, making this book an essential companion for women who want to journey forward with grace and confidence.
Caroline Baum, Booktopia

Women do a lot of things to mark turning fifty. Go to a resort! Have a bang-up party! Far, far better: read The Middlepause.
Jill Lepore, Author of The Secret History of Wonder Woman

Emotionally honest.
Tom Gatti, New Statesman

We are not supposed to beguile, we the middle-aged women. But with The Middlepause, Marina Benjamin does that: she beguiles and entrances with a lyrical, thoughtful, erudite, and always lucid exploration of the middle years of her life, and what they mean to her, and what middle-aged women mean to society.
Rose George, Author of The Big Necessity

Beautifully written and so thoughtful, The Middlepause made me think about fleeting time and what is important to me. I couldn’t put it down.
Amy Jenkins, Author of Honeymoon and Creator of This Life

Intimate, open-hearted, clever and kind, this book is a companion which, by naming the shadow fears, finds the truer gold.
Jay Griffiths, Author of Kith

A candid and beautifully written “wrinkles and all” meditation on the middle years with all their dilemmas and challenges … [Marina Benjamin] seeks a new vision of how to be middle-aged happily and harmoniously without sentiment or delusion.
Caroline Sanderson, The Bookseller

Deeply moving and gorgeously written ... Marina Benjamin leads us on a journey into the heart of age-ist darkness, then upwards into a light of self-understanding as she faces that most difficult of all challenges — not death but getting old.
Margaret Wertheim, Author of Pythagoras’ Trousers

A 21st-century meditation on middle age … The Middlepause is erudite, with a lengthy list of notes and ideas for further reading, but it is also personal – part memoir, part unflinching travelogue through the unsettling physical and mental challenges of the menopause … Honest and uplifting.
FIT

Lucid and sophisticated … A restrained but wonderful guide to the convulsive changes of 50 and over … This is a book that yields valuable insights on almost every page.
Melissa Benn, The Guardian

A candid look at what it means to be 50 today … Warm, wise and beautifully written.
Good Housekeeping

Benjamin has conjured something philosophically poised and poetic from an unlikely subject, as much about the sanctuary of place and coming to terms with time, seasons and life’s cycles, and all rendered with clarity and calm.
Saturday Age

An honest mid-life reflection … In this elegantly written, extended essay, [Marina Benjamin] explores what it means to have lived for half-a-century, and contemplates what may be left in perhaps another half-century.
The Jewish Chronicle

A personal meditation on the losses and gains of facing the middle years … [Marina Benjamin] offers hope and heart to others facing the same life transition.
Irish Examiner

Benjamin combines personal experience with more objective scientific and historical accounts of ageing … Elegantly written.
Prospect

This is a measured and beautifully written critique of menopause and middle age that pre-, mid-, and postmenopausal women will find eminently relatable, and that those who love and care for them will likewise appreciate.
Publishers Weekly, Starred Review

Benjamin takes us into her inner world — it’s instructive, and very moving.
William Leith, Evening Standard

Brilliant … Merciless in the gentle accuracy with which it asks, very simply and persistently: “What did you think was going to happen?” A Beautiful Young Wife is a book that could derail someone. There's real power in that.
Cyan Jones, Author of The Dig

A painful, razor-sharp portrait of what it is to be an ageing man … Beautiful, concise, taut.
Mariella Frostrup, BBC Radio 4, ‘Open Book’

Fiction at its most precise and potent.
Julie Myerson, The Observer

While the narrative focuses on the collapse of one man’s world, it still raises huge moral questions … Haunting.
The Sunday Times

An examination of the ageing male heart – a dissection as subtle and tender as it is, ultimately, unnerving … A wonderfully disconcerting piece of work which, on a second and even a third reading, only seems to grow more expansive and multifaceted while managing at the same time to remain mysterious and tightly furled … If one of the purposes of fiction is to show us ourselves, Wieringa’s mirror is polished to perfection.
Julie Myerson, The Observer

You don't so much read this novel as take it in intravenously. It goes straight to the blood — brief, brutal and beautiful.
Samantha Harvey, Author of Dear Thief

Brutally precise.
Cathy Rentzenbrink, Stylist

Elegantly written and thoughtful.
Emerald Street

Brilliantly written … the last few pages are mesmerising.
The Saturday Age

Wieringa is a writer with range and skill … Mesmerising.
Sunday Herald

Perfectly dosed prose (translated with elegance by Sam Garrett) and unfaltering narrative control … Wieringa’s lithe 128 pages fill half an afternoon, but days later the figure of our Job-like hero, weeping at his lecture podium, is an unforgettable warning that both romantic as well as scientific endeavours require empathy and imagination.
The Spectator

Wieringa takes us on a journey deep into the psyche of an ageing male in this potent work … No words are wasted in this thought-provoking love story.
Herald Sun

With his lyrical, sombre dialogue, restrained ambience, formed with well-chosen, evocative words, the author doses drama but the cruelty always pops up with an unexpected blow.
Corriere Della Sera

A magician at work.
De Morgen

Wieringa’s masterful depiction of a faltering marriage.
De Volkskrant

A fine-grained look at the soul of a man and his alarming fall from grace.
William Leith, Evening Standard

So Sad Today is a desperately honest collection of essays, the kind that make you cringe as you eagerly, shamelessly consume them. Melissa Broder lays herself bare but she does so with strength, savvy, and style. Above all, these essays are sad and uncomfortable and their own kind of gorgeous. They reveal so much about what it is to live in this world, right now.
Roxanne Gay, New York Times Bestselling Author of Bad Feminist

If Melissa Broder weren’t so fucking funny I would have wept through this entire book.
Lena Dunham

Melissa Broder's essays are as raw as an open vein.
Molly Crabapple, Author of Drawing Blood

What a decadent, hilarious, important, devastating book this is. So Sad Today will explode on impact in your mind.
Jami Attenberg, New York Times Bestselling Author of The Middlesteins and Saint Mazie

With irreverence and wit, Melissa Broder confronts the most hidden and grotesque parts of herself. Reading her, it seems that we're all fucked-up, but it's because of this that we connect with each other, fall in love, find contentment, and maybe even a little happiness.
Sarah Gerard, Author of Binary Star

From the moment I started this book, I couldn’t put it down…Melissa Broder GETS IT. This book takes the side effects of mental illness and makes them funny … Anyone that is battling with depression, anxiety, existential dread/crises, or just anyone who has a brain should read this book.
Bethany Cosentino of Best Coast

Irreverent, ballsy, impossible to put down. With courage and humour, Broder shows us that the underbelly of self-awareness is the existential sads.’
Courtney Maum, Author of I Am Having So Much Fun Here Without You

If symptoms could write, they would sound a lot like Melissa Broder’s So Sad Today. Broder's angst is existential and pathological and filled with as many holes as there are things to fill it with. These strangely compelling essays are an insight into the perverse persistence of hope and humanity, even in the age of clickbait and online individualism.
Dr Nina Power, Author of One-Dimensional Woman

Broder fully embraces the peaks and valleys of her emotional landscape … Vividly rendered and outspokenly delivered … Compulsively readable.
Kirkus

Extravagantly intimate … There’s a bleak beauty in the way Broder articulates her lowest moments.
Bookforum

An utterly bewitching book and … a thrillingly tangible account of what it is to be a human being, right here, right now. I loved it. So many staggering — and difficult — observations. So many beautiful turns of phrase. There aren't many writers who can stare into the abyss and report back with humour, panache, and a rich, gutsy spirit. Melissa Broder can. It's a book I'm going to read again, and talk about, and pass on.
Emma Jane Unsworth, Author of Animals

At once devastating and delightful, this deeply personal collection of essays is as raw as it is funny.
Cosmopolitan US

Broder’s essays often left me with a sharp sense of feminine recognition. I would read her accounts of heartbreak, sexual dissatisfaction, and alienation and think, Same…
newyorker.com

Broder writes with the kind of honesty that can make you cringe and laugh, and then catch your breath, brought up short by a kind of existential dread.
salon.com

Her writing … feels like a friend reaching out and saying “Hey, me too.”
I-D

… Melissa Broder is undoubtedly one of the best essay stylists at work today … Broder’s writing is funny and sober, her honesty uncomfortable and comforting, and reading her book is just like getting a text from your best friend ... It’s easy enough to say that So Sad Today is brutally honest, but there’s a real kindness to Broder’s honesty, too, the intimacy with which it beckons a reader’s shy and tender heart. In Broder’s company, we can dare to tremble at our own depths.
Ploughshares

Her poignant (and at times profane) writing remains a wonderful antidote to a constant stream of other people’s touted successes, delivered with generosity and without any judgment. This book is full of dirty secrets, all of which are transformed into something healing when they reach the light of day … The resulting collection is both gross and gorgeous, infused with explicit sexuality (content warning) and visceral ugliness, and often offers a perfect union of the two.
The Globe and Mail

So Sad Today is astonishingly refreshing.
Rookie

An unabashed description of what life is like when the drugs don’t work … [So Sad Today] will ring true with anyone who has ever suffered from anxiety.
The Jewish Chronicle

[F]unny-sad.
The Herald

A suspenseful, character-driven, eerily prescient moral thriller.
Cameron Woodhead, Saturday Age

Told with all the wit, humanity, and insight of [Miller's] acclaimed debut … Best book we’ve read in ages.
Sunday Canberra Times

Miller cuts through the rhetoric and the cynicism and gets to the heart of what is happening in our world at the moment … This is a must read from a writer of extreme talent and compassion.
Jon Page, Pages & Pages Booksellers

A heart-thumping thriller … [Miller's] first book, Norwegian By Night, was one of my favourite books of 2012, and I think this one’s even better.
Townsville Bulletin

[An] important novel that tries to convey not only the drivers of the headlines but also the situation that remains when the news cycle moves on.
Robert Goodman, austcrimefiction.org

One of the finest literary thrillers of the year. Derek B. Miller is now firmly in my Must-Read category of authors.
Simon McDonald, writtenbysime.com

An important novel full of humanity and humour.
Karen Hardy, Sunday Canberra Times

Funny, sad, enlightening, and upliftingly hopeful … the story wraps around you like a cloak that you never want to let go.
Sunday Territorian

Miller brilliantly blends offbeat reflection and dark emotion ... A penetrating, poetic, and unexpectedly disarming book about the ageless conflict in the Middle East.
Kirkus

It's a powerful book, a dystopic vision of the future of South Africa.
J.M. Coetzee

This post-apocalyptic successor to Heart of Darkness excavates the traumas of a nation … Trencherman can be read as one of the foundational texts of post-1994 South African speculative fiction.
Patrick Flanery, The Guardian

The South Africa [in Trencherman] is a dystopia to rival JM Coetzee’s vision of the country in Disgrace… Eben Venter is a consummate stylist who skillfully conjures a gathering sense of menace.
Gillian Slovo, FT

Eben Venter is one of the notable voices in white South African writing post-Apartheid.
Aidan Hartley, Spectator

Fascinating and captivating … This is a deeply unsettling and thought-provoking portrayal of an imagined future and a worthy modern successor to Conrad’s novel.
Nudge Books

Macabrely effective … Trencherman sets out to warn us about the putative failure of democracy in South Africa, but ends up as a gorgeously bleak memorial to the Afrikaner’s pessimism and bewildered sense of loss.
Elizabeth Lowry, TLS

A masterful book, lovingly translated.
Weekend Australian

In this splendid novel, Fallada portrays the despondency and apathy of the German people in this strange period. The last months of the war are described with masterly skill, as well as the subsequent capitulation, the arrival of the Russian troops, the way in which the middle class, the “bourgeoisie” must adapt to this new environment, and the moral decline of the population.
Zwiebelfisch

It’s easy to see why Graham Greene — no small master of moral thrillers himself — so admired this writer.
Cameron Woodhead, Sydney Morning Herald, Pick of the Week

A densely packed chronicle that is of both literary and historical value … That this is furthermore a gripping and brilliantly written work goes without saying.
Berliner Zeitung

Nightmare in Berlin is the symbol for everything that happened after the end of the war.
Der Tagesspiegel

Nightmare in Berlin represents a crucial moment in Fallada’s realisation that it is not the ruins, but human lives that count.
Norddeutsche Zeitung

A strikingly honest book, a piece of human history.
Frankfurter Neue Presse

One reads the story of Dr Doll, who is crushed by a nightmarish existence in a city of ruins, with intense sympathy.
Freiheit Düsseldorf

The book that cleared the way for Alone in Berlin.
Jenny Williams, Author of More Lives Than One: A Biography of Hans Fallada

A vital, painful examination of a devastated, morally bereft city.
The Listener

I was very struck by the immediacy of Fallada’s writing in this book - it feels fresh, modern and direct ... [his] ability to find glimpses of light amidst the darkness makes him a striking chronicler of his time.
Mariella Frostrup, BBC Radio 4, ‘Open Book’

[Fallada’s] account of the agonized internal conflict of a writer, torn between the self-protective instinct to detach himself from the horror that surrounds him and the imperative to bear witness to it, has the appalled urgency of confession with little hope of absolution. Rawer and more unevenly wrought than Alone in Berlin, Nightmare in Berlin is the necessary precursor to that great work.
New Statesman

A tale of survival in [post-war Berlin]’s ruins.
The Sunday Times

[Fallada] digs deep into ­the human psyche to explore guilt – both collective and individual – and the battle to stay sane while surrounded by chaos … [His] character studies and local colour – whether of gritty cityscape or lurid dreamscape – prove consistently captivating … A mesmerising portrait of shattered lives.
The National

Painful and poignant.

This is a tense, atmospheric, almost dreamlike novel, shifting between moods of despair and hope. It is rich in internal stories … bold, strident, ironic and often ambivalent fiction.
Eileen Battersby, The Irish Times

[Nightmare in Berlin] begins in gripping style and is fascinating on the mentality of a population brought to its knees.
Anthony Gardner, The Mail on Sunday

[Nightmare in Berlin] evokes the apathy and despair of postwar Germany with chilling resonance and the author’s trademark humanity.
Eileen Battersby, The Irish Times

Records in powerful detail the reality of life for Germans living in a defeated and occupied country.
The Mail on Sunday

Fallada describes Berlin as an almost post-apocalyptic city dominated by death, drugs, apathy, and the almost blackly comic pettiness of the human survival instinct. This translation of this compelling novel enables a new audience to experience Fallada’s fascinating and conflicted perspective.
Booklist