AustLit

'A. S. Patrić’s The Butcherbird Stories aims to unsettle. Each story plunges the reader into a unique scenario, enhanced by the author’s penchant for beginning in medias res. Further discombobulating the reader, the stories often experiment with voice, milieu and structure. However, the work may be thematically organised by an interest in masculine violence, and in liminal states that hover somewhere between the rational and irrational.' (Introduction)

'Tom Keneally has been at the game of writing novels for a long time now. Although he has always been an uneven writer, the best of his work is made to last. If 50 years ago his Catholic Church novel Three Cheers for the Paraclete – with a hero who according to legend was based on that dashing and personable priest Edmund Campion – seemed like a thinnish enactment of a bright idea, there had already been Bring Larks and Heroes, which made Keneally look like the natural successor to Patrick White and which is a passionate dramatic work that called out for comparison to The Crucible or Camus’ The Plague.'  (Introduction)