Miller - Coal Creek

Praise forAutumn Laing

... in many respects Millers best yet... a penetrating and moving examination of long-dead dreams and the ravages of growing old.

Times Literary Supplement

A beautiful book.

Irish Times

Such riches. All of Alex Millers wisdom and experienceof art, of women and what drives them, of writing, of men and their ambitionsand every mirage and undulation of the Australian landscape are here, transmuted into rare and radiant fiction. An indispensable novel.

Australian Book Review

That Alex Miller in a seemingly effortless fashion is able to gouge out the innermost recesses of the artistic soul in his latest novel, Autumn Laing, speaks volumes about the command he has of his craft and the insights that a lifetime of wrestling with his own creative impulses has brought. Miller has invested this story of art and passion with his own touch of genius and it is, without question, a triumph of a novel.

Canberra Times, Panorama

Miller has fun with his cast of characters and humour, while black, ripples through the narrative, leavening Autumns more corrosive judgements and insights. Miller engages so fully with his female characters that divisions between the sexes seem to melt away and all stand culpable, vulnerable, human on equal ground. Miller is also adept at taking abstract conceptsabout art or societyand securing them in the convincing form of his complex, unpredictable characters and their vivid interior monologues.

The Monthly

Few writers have Millers ability to create tension of this depth out of old timbers such as guilt, jealousy, selfishness, betrayal, passion and vision. AutumnLaing is more than just beautifully crafted. It is inhabited by characters whose reality challenges our own.

Saturday Age, Life & Style

Millers long honing of the craft of his fiction has never been seen to better advantage than in Autumn Laing.

Sydney Morning Herald, Spectrum

Nowhere in Millers work has the drama of character been so wellsynthesised with the drama of ideas. Nowhere else have his characters drunk ideas like wine and exhaled them like cigarette smoke, a philosophical questing indistinguishable from defiant bohemian excess.

Weekend Australian, Review

Its a tale of love, of longing, of creation and of a Melbourne recently past. Ambitious, hypnotic and deeply moving.

Sunday Telegraph, Insider

... fine balances are struck throughout the work. Conservatism and modernism, aesthetics and ethics, nationalism and cosmopolitanism, established class structures and creative aristocracy: each of these conflicting forces unfolds organically through the social interactions and the rhetorical back-and-forth that mark the Laings convivial artists parties... Millers prose is so simply wrought it almost disguises its sophistication. Yet we feel the soft impress of the Anglo-American modernists on his sentences; the fealty he shows to the great 19th-century realists when building the inner lives of his women and men. Like Dante, a voice that was not Millers own has entered his breast and breathes there. The result transforms one womans dying words into pure and living art.

Weekend Australian, Review

Autumn Laing is a true triumph.

Sunday Herald Sun

Autumn Laing is a magisterial work, multi-award-winning Millers longest and most compelling and a triumphant culmination of a series of novels about art and the artists relationship to it... a compulsively readable tale.

Adelaide Advertiser

Millers language rises to his theme with a swaggering richness.

Sunday Age

Praise forLovesong

With Lovesong, one of our finest novelists has written perhaps his finest book... Lovesong explores, with compassionate attentiveness, the essential solitariness of people. Millers prose is plain, lucid, yet full of plangent resonance.

The Age

Millers brilliant, moving novel captures exactly that sense of a storybuilt lifewonderful and terrifying in equal measure, stirring and abysmal, a world in which both heaven and earth remain present, yet stubbornly out of reach.

Sunday Age

Lovesong is a limpid and elegant study of the psychology of love and intimacy. The characterisation is captivating and the framing metafictional narrative skilfully constructed.

Australian Book Review

... a ravishing, psychologically compelling work from one of our best...

Courier-Mail

... another triumph: lyrical, soothing and compelling. Miller enriches human fragility with literary beauty...

Newcastle Herald

The intertwining stories are told with gentleness, some humour, some tragedy and much sweetness. Miller is that rare writer who engages the intellect and the emotions simultaneously, with a creeping effect.

Bookseller & Publisher

With exceptional skill, Miller records the ebb and flow of emotion... Lovesong is a poignant tale of infidelity; but it is more than that. It is a manifesto for the novel, a tribute to the human rite of fiction with the novelist officiating.

Australian Literary Review

Praise forLandscape of Farewell

The latest novel by the Australian master, so admired by other writers, and a work of subtle genius.

Sebastian Barry

Landscape of Farewell is a triumph.

Hilary McPhee

Alex Miller is a wonderful writer, one that Australia has been keeping secret from the rest of us for too long.

John Banville

Landscape of Farewell has a rare level of wisdom and profundity. Few writers since Joseph Conrad have had so fine an appreciation of the equivocations of the individual conscience and their relationship to the long processes of history... [It is] a very human story, passionately told.

Australian Book Review

As readers of his previous novelsThe Ancestor Game, Prochowniks Dream, Journey to the Stone Countrywill know, Miller is keenly interested in inner lives. Landscape of Farewell continues his own quest, and in doing so, speaks to his reader at the deepest of levels. He juggles philosophical balls adroitly in prose pitched to an emotional perfection. Every action, every comma, is loaded with meaning. As one expects from the best fiction, the novel transforms the readers own inner life. Twice winner of the Miles Franklin Award, it is only a matter of time before Miller wins a Nobel. No Australian has written at this pitch since Patrick White. Indeed, some critics are comparing him with Joseph Conrad.

Daily News, New Zealand

Praise forProchowniks Dream

Assured and intense... truly gripping... This is a thoroughly engrossing piece of writing about the process of making art, a revelatory transformation in fact.

Australian Bookseller & Publisher

With this searing, honest and exhilarating study of the inner life of an artist, Alex Miller has created another masterpiece.

Good Reading

Prochowniks Dream is an absorbing and satisfying novel, distinguished by Millers enviable ability to evoke the appearance and texture of paintings in the often unyielding medium of words.

Andrew Riemer, Sydney Morning Herald

Miller is a master storyteller.

The Monthly

A beautiful novel of ideas which never eclipse the characters.

The Age

Praise forJourney to the Stone Country

The most impressive and satisfying novel of recent years. It gave me all the kinds of pleasure a reader can hope for.

Tim Winton

A terrific tale of love and redemption that captivates from the first line.