AustLit

'Each title and topic references law in some way, so the first-time reader may be intimidated by the regulatory tone before finding that there are delightful laws for broccoli and rubber gloves between weightier treatments of love and the passage of time. Law evokes perceptions of truth and consequence in the sciences as well, and while a glum magistrate may have cast his veto in the Senate, Pliny the Elder was across town compiling his Naturalis Historia, an encyclopedia not so different from The Law of Poetry. While Rome stamped its brand of law on justice and the stars, something corrosive was stirring in its roots.' (Publication abstract)

'There are many books that kindle nostalgia for the pleasures of childhood, but there is also the rare book that does the same for its calamities. Tony Birch’s Ghost River is a novel that paints young lives, then dangles them perilously close to booze, neglect, corrupt police, a Greek gangster, and the silt- and body-clogged river that runs through their backyards. The pages are lean and read quickly, like some cinematic current or the fleeting attention spans of the young, and though you do not have to be young or old or even Australian to enjoy the meanders of Birch’s plot, you must have immense reserves of your own imagination to endure its drying up in the final stretches of the book. Luckily for Birch, Ghost River builds enough momentum through its little protagonists’ immense charms to leave readers focused on them and not the lulls in narrative weight. ' (Introduction)