Alex Miller - Max: A Gripping and Deeply MovingTribute to a Friend and Jewish Nazi-Resistance Figure

Praise for Alex Miller

Max

A successful combination of the life of Max Blatt and the gripping story of the authors search for him. Charmian Brinson, Emeritus Professor of German, Imperial College London

A wonderful book. Miller is faithful to Max Blatts story, to his silences and to his sadness. It is a story that needs to be heard. Jay Winter, Charles J. Stille Professor of History, Yale University

Max tells of Alex Millers searchin turns fearful and elatedfor the elusive past of Max Blatt, a man he loves, who loved him and who taught him that he must write with love. Miller discovers that he is also searching for a defining part of himself, formed by his relation to Max Blatt, but whose significance will remain obscure until he finds Max, complete, in his history. With Max, Miller the novelist has written a wonderful work of non-fiction, as fine as the best of his novels. Always a truth-seeker, he has rendered himself vulnerable, unprotected by the liberties permitted to fiction. Max is perhaps his most moving book, a poignant expression of piety, true to his mentors injunction to write with love. Raimond Gaita, Emeritus Professor of Moral Philosophy, Kings College London, and award-winning author of Romulus, My Father

The Passage of Love

Millers story is long, intense and vital. Geordie Williamson

Alex Millers new novel The Passage of Love is capacious, wise, and startlingly honest about human frailty and the permutations of love over time. Frankly autobiographical, it is also a work of fully achieved fiction, ripe with experience, double-voiced, peopled with unpredictable men and women, and set in Millers landscapes that characteristically throb with life. Morag Fraser, Books of the Year, Australian Book Review

Half a dozen of Millers novels are likely to be judged among the finest of the past quarter century. They were written in the course of a career that has showcased Millers subtlety, narrative craft, moral acuity and delight in writing about what he loves. Weekend Australian Magazine

Conflicting demands that can throttle creativity are a big motif in this bildungsroman A thoughtful autobiographical work by an award-winning Australian novelist traces themes of art and commitment through Crofts relationships with three women. Miller pulls back from the narrative several times in interludes that return to the first person of the much older man and highlight how memory has many layers. A rich addition to the growing shelf of autofiction from a seasoned storyteller. Kirkus (starred review)

delivers an enthralling fusion of fiction and memoir. Tom Griffiths, Books of the Year, Australian Book Review

While Millers novels are immediately accessible to the general reading public, they are manifestly works of high literary seriousnesssubstantial, technically masterly and assured, intricately interconnected, and of great imaginative, intellectual and ethical weight. Robert Dixon in Alex Miller: The Ruin of Time

It is riveting and a masterpiece in every way great emotional depth a magnificent achievement. Nicholas Birns, Professor of English at the New School in New York and author of Contemporary Australian Literature

The Passage of Love is a novel that explicitly revisits aspects of Millers life with the aim of shedding light on subjects beyond its biographical orbit a slow-burning catalogue of marital breakdown enlivened only by Millers trademark prose, limpid and grave and stately in progression, each sentence fragment tongue-and-grooved with the next. Australian Book Review

An intimate book Miller has a gift for examining the domestic and exploring private lives. Good Reading

The Passage of Love offers an insight into a great writers journey Miller maintains a tangible sense of place throughout, in particular, the landscape of isolated country NSW. This novel is a must for fans of Miller. Books + Publishing

There is something elegiac about The Passage of Love, in its detailing of a vanished 1950s Melbourne, in the passion and urgency of its fierce protagonist Millers writing has the muscularity of decades-earned craft, spare and unsentimental, probing the sinews of marriage, delineating the arc of love affairs, of struggle and disappointment. Irish Times

Miles Franklin award-winner, Miller has crafted a novel thats individual in its essence with originality and sensitivity. PS News

The Passage of Love is a gift. It tells us about living with an undeniable creative force and the consequences of being utterly transparent in ones desires. It is an observation, a sharing of knowledge and a transcript of a life lived with yearning Extraordinary. Readings

The most candid, sharing, generous book Ive read in a long, long time. ABC Radio

A great read with profound insights into the nature of love and creativity. Australian Financial Review

An exquisitely personal life story told in a fictional style Miller draws on memories, dreams, stories, love and death to create a moving and raw fictional novel that is the closest to an autobiography likely to be read from him. In a rich blend of thoughtful and beautifully observed writing, the lives of a husband and wife are laid bare in their passionate struggle to engage with their individual creativity. Highlife

The Simplest Words

Most collections of this kind are interesting and useful reminders of the value of a writer of considerable literary standing. The Simplest Words is more powerful than that, because of Millers intense engagement with his subjects, and because Stephanie Miller has chosen pieces that speak to one another, accounting, in a way, for one of our most original, engagingly vehement and expansive writers. Brenda Walker, Australian Book Review

This is a rich, generous compilation that enticingly refracts our perceptions of one of Australias finest novelists. Peter Pierce, Saturday Age

[Millers] writing has a luminous quality that sings off the page and whether he is writing on family, friendship, memory or just life, he engages with the reader, involving them in his orbit. Helen Caples and Martin Stevenson, The Examiner

Coal Creek

Millers voice is never more pure or lovely than when he channels it through an instrument as artless as Bobby The intelligence of the author haunts the novel, like an atmosphere. Geordie Williamson, The Monthly

a master of visceral description. Weekend Australian

Because of this subdued mode of storytelling, the tension mounts gradually and when tragedy strikes it is truly, hideously, mesmerising an evocative and moving novel of the Australian bush. Books + Publishing

Coal Creek is a story of friendship, love, loyalty and the consequences of mistrust set against Millers exquisite depictions of the country of the Queensland highlands. Books and Arts Daily

Autumn Laing

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

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

Millers prose is so simply wrought it almost disguises its sophistication The result transforms one womans dying words into pure and living art.