In "The Brisbane Times", John Birmingham is quite definitive, The Trout Opera by Matthew Condon is The Great Australian Novel: "Ten years in the writing, beautifully realised, every goddamned page is a smack upside the head to the rest of us loser writers who couldn't hope to string together a single phrase with the pure bred artistry that Condon lavishes over nigh on 600 pages."
Cynthia Ward concludes that a new sf novel by Sylvia Kelso, Amberlight, "is the best new fiction I've read in 2007". It's a change, she says, from all the sf that sees no amicable resolution to the battle of the sexes.
In "Lahontan Valley News and Fallon Eagle Standard", Kirk Robinson reviews The Unknown Terrorist by Richard Flanagan: "...what is most compelling is Flanagan's astutely cynical portrayal of a contemporary society -- celebrity culture -- in which fear is a prized commodity to maintain control; a world in which innuendo and rumor-mongering is instantly available to all...It's a darkly imagined urban wasteland where legitimate and illegitimate worlds become indistinguishable, one in which the media is not interested in the truth, or its victims, but only in how the story will play."
Emily Donaldson opines, in "The Toronto Star", that Orpheus Lost by Janette Turner Hospital just doesn't quite make it: "Under all this awkward hyperbole and metaphorical bling there is a decent thriller trying to claw its way up and into the light of day."
