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Praiseworthy (hardcover edition)
Winner of the Stella Prize
This product is the hardcover edition of Praiseworthy. There is a paperback edition available here.
Order the book at a reduced price as part of a monochrome set of Alexis Wright fiction books.
The new novel from the internationally acclaimed, award-winning Australian author Alexis Wright, in a limited edition hardcover.
Praiseworthy is an epic set in the north of Australia, told with the richness of language and scale of imagery for which Alexis Wright has become renowned. In a small town dominated by a haze cloud, which heralds both an ecological catastrophe and a gathering of the ancestors, a crazed visionary seeks out donkeys as the solution to the global climate crisis and the economic dependency of the Aboriginal people. His wife seeks solace from his madness in following the dance of butterflies and scouring the internet to find out how she can seek repatriation for her Aboriginal/Chinese family to China. One of their sons, called 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. This is a novel which pushes allegory and language to its limits, a cry of outrage against oppression and disadvantage, and a fable for the end of days.
WINNER: The Stella Prize 2024
WINNER: University of Queensland Fiction Book Award, Queensland Literary Awards 2023
SHORTLISTED: The Dublin Literary Award 2024
SHORTLISTED: New South Wales Premier’s Literary Award – People’s Choice Award 2024
SHORTLISTED: New South Wales Premier’s Literary Award – Christina Stead Prize for Fiction 2024
SHORTLISTED: New South Wales Premier’s Literary Award – Indigenous Writers’ Prize 2024
SHORTLISTED: The James Tait Black Prize – Fiction 2024
SHORTLISTED: Queensland Premier’s Award for a Work of State Significance, Queensland Literary Awards 2023
The most ambitious and accomplished Australian novel of this century.
Samuel Rutter, New York Times Book Review
A wonder of twenty-first century fiction… Startlingly original, fiercely political, uncompromising in every respect, Praiseworthy expands the possibility of the novel form.
Judges’ comments, Dublin Literary Award
Fierce and gloriously funny, Praiseworthy is a genre-defiant epic of climate catastrophe proportions. Part manifesto, part indictment…Praiseworthy belies its elegy-like form to stand firm in the author’s Waanyi worldview and remind us that this is not the end times for that or any Country. Instead it asks, which way my people? Which way humanity?
Judges’ comments, The Stella Prize 2024
As a craftsperson, few can match Wright. Her use of language is dazzling in the truest sense of the world – bewildering and surprising with brilliance.
Nominating library, Dublin Literary Award 2024
I’m awed by the range, experiment and political intelligence of [Alexis Wright’s] work…she is vital on the subject of land and people.
Robert Macfarlane, The New York Times Book Review
Monumental…Praiseworthy blew me away…If you think you know what assimilation is, you should read Praiseworthy and think again.
Tony Hughes-d’Aeth, Australian Book Review
An abundant odyssey that contains a formidable vision of Australia’s future. This is a long journey through the imagination, a novel both urgent and deeply contemplated…The rich interrelations of ancestral spirits, larger-than-life characters, and Country all derive from the Aboriginal traditions of storytelling. But there are also signs of literary influence from every compass point on the map, including, most notably, the surrealism and magic realism of writers such as Jorge Luis Borges and Gabriel Garcia Marquez.
Jack Cameron Stanton, The Age
