Praiseworthy by Alexis Wright

Praiseworthy by Alexis Wright

In a small Aboriginal town dominated by a haze cloud, which heralds both an ecological catastrophe and a gathering of the ancestors, a crazed visionary seeks out a solution to the global climate crisis. Praiseworthy is a novel that pushes allegory and language to its limits, and is both a sharp satire and a thoughtful fable for the end of days.

'The great Moana Jackson declared the doctrine of discovery a legal fictionIn Praiseworthy, farce, satire, tragedy, the colloquial, myth, pun, repetition, elegy, and the epic expose the absurdity of the doctrine and the everyday lies, habits and horrors keeping it in place. Praiseworthy is simply astonishing.' Judges of the 2023 Queensland Award for Literary Fiction ---- 'I'm awed by the range, experiment and political intelligence of Alexis Wright's work. She is vital on the subject of land and people.' Robert Macfarlane, New York Times Book Review ---- 'Monumental. Praiseworthy blew me away. If you think you know what assimilation is, you should read Praiseworthy and think again.' Tony Hughes-d'Aeth, Australian Book Review ---- ‘Linguistically commodious, panoramically plotted, Praiseworthy’s 700-plus-page scale would have given Henry James a heart attack: it is a baggy monster, and more monstrous than most. Its vision is dark, humour tar-black, narration irrepressible, language roiling and rococo. All life, as in Balzac, is here … 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 … Long after the lesser concerns of contemporary fiction have ceased to matter, the work of Alexis Wright will remain.’ Declan Fry, The Guardian ---- 'The rich interrelations of ancestral spirits, larger-than-life characters, and Country all derive from the Aboriginal traditions of storytelling. But there are also signs of literary influence from every compass point on the map, including, most notably, the surrealism and magic realism of writers such as Jorge Luis Borges and Gabriel Garcia Marquez.' Jack Cameron Stanton, The Age ---- 'Praiseworthy is Alexis Wright's most formidable act of imaginative synthesis yet . . . A hero's journey for an age of global warming, a devastating story of young love caught between two laws, and an extended elegy and ode to Aboriginal law and sovereignty.' Jane Gleeson-White, The Conversation

Alexis Wright, a member of the Waanyi nation of the southern highlands of the Gulf of Carpentaria, is one of Australia’s most acclaimed and fearless writers. Wright is the only author to win Australia's two most prestigious prizes twice each, the Miles Franklin Award (in 2007 for Carpentaria and 2024 for Praiseworthy) and the Stella Prize (in 2018 for Tracker and 2024 for Praiseworthy). Praiseworthy has won or been a finalist for seven UK, Irish and Australian prizes.

SKU	Unavailable
ISBN 13	9781913505929
ISBN 10	1913505928
Title	Praiseworthy
Author	Alexis Wright
Condition	Unavailable
Binding Type	Paperback
Publisher	And Other Stories
Year published	2023-11-02
Prizes	Winner of Queensland Award for Literary Fiction 2023, Short-listed for Dublin Literary Award 2024, Short-listed for James Tait Black Prize - Fiction 2024, Short-listed for Queensland Premier’s Award for a Work of State Significance, Queensland Literary Awards 2023, Short-listed for Stella Prize 2024
Cover note	Book picture is for illustrative purposes only, actual binding, cover or edition may vary.