Praise for The Dancer

It’s an extraordinary book and it just got under my skin and has filled my mind. It’s a book about my generation and the damage done so there’s a lot to recognise and it’s a book that keeps faith, with Philippa Cullen and the dance of life against the odds…The cascade of Philippa’s relationships…is awesome in every way…It is a book about Australia and our impossible relationship with the outside world…the changes that reached for the outer limits in the 70s.

Nicholas Jose

I adored The Dancer…it was absolutely the perfect reading for the tail end of the long lockdown – so transportative, it felt like I was actually going places, when I hadn’t left the house for months, and still didn’t quite have the option to! Loved the daring of the first 100 pages too, and now wish more biographies took the long view of a life.

Sam Twyford-Moore

This book is enlivening in every, extraordinary way. I want to live inside it like one of the leaves Philippa Cullen pressed between the pages of the books she read; her own and the ones she borrowed from other people.

Anna MacDonald

I finished The Dancer yesterday and am sad, for two reasons: one, because it’s been my companion during two weeks of camping and now it’s finished, and two, because Cullen’s vibrant life was cut so short. I had a bit of a cry towards the end…I really loved the book.

Tom Carment

A biography for, not of…And as always with Juers, an evocation of something more than a single life, or period, or place: events, characters, phenomena that might at first seem incidental but belong to a complexity and rich interconnection of things that she is fascinated by and which we, as readers, are seduced into finding equally relevant and illuminating.

David Malouf

I’ve plunged into The Dancer and it’s got a wonderful grip on me…I’ve never read anything quite like it. It’s one of those rare books that become an alternative world while you’re reading it… I keep thinking of…the lists of her daily tasks and duties – this moved me…the dense texture of her existence as both an artist and as an ordinary woman with friends and family she loved – how it was made up of great strokes of ambition and imagination and drama and LABOUR and at the same time of tiny, faithful, reliable, seemingly inconsequential quotidian details.

Helen Garner