Praiseworthy

Winner of the 2024 James Tait Black Prize – Fiction

Winner of the 2024 Stella Prize

Shortlisted for the 2024 Dublin Literary Award

Winner of the 2023 Queensland Award for Literary Fiction

Shortlisted for the 2023 Queensland Premier’s Award for a Work of State Significance, Queensland Literary Awards

Longlisted for the 2024 Miles Franklin Literary Award

Longlisted for the Climate Fiction Prize

In a small Aboriginal town dominated by a haze cloud, which heralds both ecological disaster and a gathering of the ancestors, Cause Man Steel is chasing a mad vision: a national donkey transport scheme that will guarantee his people’s independence forever. He finds, however, as he bundles feral donkeys into his Ford Falcon and dumps them en masse in the cemetery, that not all of Praiseworthy agrees. Outrage ferments at his desecration of traditional land, while Cause’s wife Dance seeks refuge with butterflies and dreams of moving their family to China. Bad feelings reach fever pitch when citizens catch wind of the suicide of Aboriginal Sovereignty, Cause’s eldest son. All are distraught – all, that is, except eight-year-old Tommyhawk Steel, who, with his brother gone, gleefully pursues his dream of becoming white and powerful. Told with the richness of language and scale of imagery for which Alexis Wright has become renowned, Praiseworthy is a marvel of explosive sentences, a shock to allegory, an outraged cry against oppression, and a biting satire for the end of days.

‘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

‘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

‘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

Praise for Carpentaria: ‘A magisterial yet colloquial voice which transforms the oral tradition of the country's indigenous people into a swirling narrative spiked with burlesque humor and featuring a huge cast of eccentric characters.’ New York Times Book Review

‘The great Moana Jackson declared the doctrine of discovery a legal fiction. In 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

‘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

‘Playful, formally innovative, multi-storied, allegorical, protean and dizzyingly exhilarating, it is long, lyrical and enraged – James Joyce crossed with Gabriel García Márquez, Jorge Luis Borges, Bruce Chatwin and Arundhati Roy … the warm, salty, imaginatively beautiful narrative voice draws you in.’ The Spectator

'Some books you have to simply let happen to you. Alexis Wright’s Praiseworthy is one such book...Wright has written something which is often funny, heartbreaking and politically doesn’t hold back' The Skinny

‘The layering of time and the riot of language are Wright’s great themes and raw materials, and in Praiseworthy – the most ambitious and accomplished Australian novel of this century – they twist and shimmer, doomed forever to their violent pas de deux.’ Samuel Rutter, New York Times Book Review

‘A mind-altering experience: Praiseworthy retaught me how to read.’ Astrid Edwards, Times Literary Supplement

‘An extraordinary novel … which reveals an Australia where myth and reality meet.’ Chris Power, BBC Open Book

‘Incandescent, polyphonic, free-wheeling ... This immersive epic marks a decisive stand. It suggests what would be lost were assimilation to succeed: vital knowledge for the future of humankind gleaned from the “biggest library in the world – country”. Yet its anguished elegy is offset by a confidence in survival, born of a long view of tens of thousands of years.’ Maya Jaggi, The Guardian