Enthralling and powerful
The Times
This is a confident and poignant novel and succeeds in animating a set of people rarely seen in literary fiction
Guardian
A rare and remarkable achievement
Los Angeles Times
Destined to be a classic
Melbourne Herald Sun
The Sound of One Hand Clapping achieves the difficult task of making clear and real the lives of those who normally stay hidden in history. From its wonderfully atmospheric opening to its touching conclusion, this is a heartbreaking story
Literary Review
A truly extraordinary work: vivid, passionate and utterly compelling... It opens a world that is strange, brutal and poetic at once, and ultimately achieves a kind of spirit-healing few novels do
- Niall Williams,
Richly imagined...told in a voice rarely heard in Australia: almost violently masculine, shot through with heartbreaking delicacy of feeling
- Robert Dessaix,
FROM THE BESTSELLING BOOKER PRIZE-WINNING AUTHOR
In the winter of 1954, in a construction camp in the remote Tasmanian highlands, when Sonja Buloh was three years old and her father was drinking too much, her mother disappeared into a blizzard never to return.
Thirty-five years later, Sonja returns to the place of her childhood to visit her drunkard father. The shadows of the past begin to intrude ever more forcefully into the present, forever changing his living death and her ordered life.
'Enthralling and powerful' The Times
'Confident and poignant' Guardian
'A rare and remarkable achievement' Los Angeles Times