"Uncovers a rich hidden seam in Australian history...Passionate and heartfelt.”

– The Times (London)

"Vigorous, bighearted and terrifically direct.”

– Daily Mail (London)

“[A] brave and complex book.”

– Irish Examiner (Cork)

“Tackles meaty themes and tricky parallels . . . Wonderfully imaginative.”

– The Mail on Sunday (London)

“This is a story of how to die but also of how to live . . . Consistently engaging, provocative and original . . . Keneally’s art is to make the profound accessible. The important is rendered seamlessly . . . The simple message is that there is a communality to the human experience that spans forty-two thousand years.”

– The Herald (Glasgow)

“A blunt meditation on last things, but still electric with life, passion and appetite...The account of two exceptional men who have lived ordinary lives: ordinary in the sense that they may be viewed as universal, as experiences of what it is to be a man, with all the virtues and humiliations that attend that station, across time and space...[An] intensely personal, hugely inventive and often moving novel.”

– The Australian

"A rather brave book. This impressive sketch of ghostly affinities between a man who makes images at once artistic and real out of the life he records and shapes, and another who conjures and kills and wills himself on the tightrope of justice and mercy in a time that Keneally is very adept at animating."

– The Saturday Paper (Australia)

"This is, charmingly, a book by an old man about two other old men, all three acutely aware of mortality and each making the old man's declaration: "I will talk how I want to talk for as long as I choose about whatever I want to talk about." It's quite glorious really. The whole book is a hymn to idealism, and to human development."

– The Sydney Morning Herald