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Published Feb 2024
672 pages
Genre: Literary Fiction
Paperback Original.
Publication Information
An astonishing and monumental masterpiece from the towering Australian writer Alexis Wright whose "words explode from the page" (The Monthly)
In a small town in the north of Australia, a mysterious cloud heralds both an ecological catastrophe and a gathering of the ancestors. A crazed visionary looks to donkeys to solve the global climate crisis and the economic dependency of the Aboriginal people. His wife, seeking solace from his madness, follows the dance of butterflies and scours the internet to find out how her Aboriginal/Chinese family could be repatriated to China. One of their sons, named Aboriginal Sovereignty, is determined to commit suicide. The other, Tommyhawk, wishes his brother dead so that he can pursue his dream of becoming white and powerful.
Praiseworthy is an epic which pushes allegory and language to its limit; a unique masterpiece that bends time and reality, opening new literary vistas; a cry of outrage against oppression and disadvantage; and a fable for the end of days.
"This freewheeling and heartbreaking masterpiece from Aboriginal Australian author Alexis Wright brims with the magic of myth and the painful realities of present-day climate change. At once lush and relentless, Wright's looping tale combines magical realism, absurdism, and maximalism in a rich depiction of contemporary Aboriginal life. This is unforgettable."
―Publishers Weekly (starred review)
"A shimmering vision of the legacy of colonialism in Australia, and the reasons for optimism in hoping for greater justice and autonomy for its Indigenous peoples."
―Kirkus Reviews
"I'm awed by the range, experiment and political intelligence of Wright's work: she is vital on the subject of land and people."
― Robert Macfarlane, The New York Times Book Review
"Wright has already proved herself one of Australia's deepest and most urgent thinkers. In her new novel Praiseworthy, she synthesises the themes and forms of her past work―including Carpentaria, The Swan Book and Tracker―and arrives at a furious and dense epic satirising white Australia's ongoing attacks on the colonised."
―The Guardian (Australia)
"Praiseworthy blew me away…If you think you know what assimilation is, you should read Praiseworthy and think again."
―Australian Book Review
"Praiseworthy is classic Wright: a book made of beautiful, mutable and playful language... These seven hundred-odd pages are chock full of stunning, exhilarating sentences that lead you around by the nose, taking you to some very unexpected places. Wright stretches sentences to their limits; when you think you're over one sentence, sick of it even, you land on the most satisfying note."
―Sydney Review of Books
This information about Praiseworthy was first featured
in "The BookBrowse Review" - BookBrowse's membership magazine, and in our weekly "Publishing This Week" newsletter. Publication information is for the USA, and (unless stated otherwise) represents the first print edition. The reviews are necessarily limited to those that were available to us ahead of publication. If you are the publisher or author and feel that they do not properly reflect the range of media opinion now available, send us a message with the mainstream reviews that you would like to see added.
Any "Author Information" displayed below reflects the author's biography at the time this particular book was published.
Photo: Susan Gordon-Brown
Alexis Wright is a member of the Waanyi nation of the southern highlands of the Gulf of Carpentaria. The author of the prize-winning novels Carpentaria and The Swan Book, Wright has published three works of non-fiction: Take Power, an oral history of the Central Land Council; Grog War, a study of alcohol abuse in the Northern Territory; and Tracker, an award-winning collective memoir of Aboriginal leader Tracker Tilmouth. Her work has been translated into Chinese, Polish, French, and Italian. She held the position of Boisbouvier Chair in Australian Literature at the University of Melbourne between 2017–2022. Wright is the only author to win both the Miles Franklin Award (in 2007 for Carpentaria) and the Stella Prize (in 2018 for Tracker).
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