Carpentaria

Praise for Carpentaria

Wright breaks all the rules of grammar and syntax to sweep us along on a great torrent of language that thrills and amazes with its inventiveness and humor and with the sheer power of its storytelling… Like the Gulf Country itself, this is big enough to lose yourself in. Once in, you may never want to be found.
— Sydney Morning Herald

Carpentaria is that rare kind of novel which opens up an entire world to the reader.


— Australian Book Review

Wright's award-winning second novel [Carpentaria] offers in Phantom one of the most compelling literary protagonists since Odysseus and will surely stand as a masterpiece of modern English-language literature. 

— Library Journal

Carpentaria is a big book, more than 500 pages, big enough to enter a world, to feel as if you once lived in a town called Desperance. 


— The Age

The writing is the best in the country, some of the best in the world; we call to mind Alexis Wright when they talk about our country’s great literary voice.
— Tara June Winch - The Guardian

Wright’s vision is dark, humour tar-black, narration irrepressible, language roiling and rococo. All life, as in Balzac, is here, on a scale far bigger than anything the caffeinated Frenchman envisioned: Wright gives us the living and the dead, material and non-material, Country and people; all the masters dreamed of, and all they neglected to; the entire human (and non-human) comedy. . . . The sense is of Country cheerfully accommodating everything: high and low, chaos and epiphany, farce and deep time. Long after the lesser concerns of contemporary fiction have ceased to matter, the work of Alexis Wright will remain.
— Declan Fry - The Guardian (Australia)

An epic, exhilarating, unsettling novel. 
— Wall Street Journal

Imagine Gabriel García Márquez’s fictional town Macondo set on dustier ground and with considerably more magic—and aboriginal mythology—worked into the magical realism, and you have some approximation of Wright’s fluent tale. . . . A latter-day epic that speaks, lyrically, to the realities and aspirations of aboriginal life.
— Kirkus Reviews

A swelling, heaving tsunami of a novel: stinging, sinuous, salted with outrageous humour, sweetened by spiralling lyricism and swaggering with the confident promise of a tale dominated by risk, roguery and revelation.
— The Australian

By the end of the book you’ll be seduced by its Dreamtime logic, and probably persuaded by its passionate political and ecological message. It’s not an easy read, but if you want to know the real Australia, persevere.
— The Daily Telegraph (UK)

Rarely does an author have such control of her words and her story: Wright’s prose soars between the mythical and the colloquial.
— Publishers Weekly

There is hope here in these stories—the big ones and the little ones in between—but like Norm, you’ll need to dive in and almost drown in them to find it. Like Will, the reader is on a quest. Like Truthful the copper, you won’t know quite what to believe. And like Elias, you’ll emerge from this astonishing novel, sodden but illuminated, and with part of your brain left somewhere in the Dreamtime.
— The Independent (UK)

Alexis Wright’s Carpentaria is a masterpiece of the art form, a novel of immense accomplishment that combines local storytelling with national history, interweaving themes of conquest and subjugation with the struggle between indigenous and foreign civilizations. Most importantly, this work of art is composed in the most exquisite literary style, making someone like me who writes novels as a profession feel absolute awe and admiration


— Mo Yan (Winner of the 2012 Nobel Prize)

Strikingly original.
— CBC