Praiseworthy

by Alexis Wright

Overview

An astonishing and monumental masterpiece from the towering Australian writer Alexis Wright whose “words explode from the page” (The Monthly)

WINNER OF THE 2024 MILES FRANKLIN AWARD

WINNER OF THE 2024 STELLA PRIZE

WINNER OF THE 2024 JAMES TAIT BLACK PRIZE

WINNER OF THE 2023 QUEENSLAND AWARD FOR LITERARY FICTION

SHORTLISTED FOR THE 2024 DUBLIN LITERARY AWARD

In a small town in the north of Australia, a mysterious haze cloud heralds both an ecological catastrophe and a gathering of the ancestors. A visionary on his own holy quest, Cause Man Steel seeks the perfect platinum donkey to launch an Aboriginal-owned donkey transport industry, saving Country and the world from fossil fuels. His wife, Dance, seeking solace from his madness, studies butterflies and moths and dreams of repatriating her family to China. One of their sons, named Aboriginal Sovereignty, is determined to end it all by walking into the sea. Their other child, Tommyhawk, wants nothing more than to be adopted by Australia’s most powerful white woman. Praiseworthy is an epic masterpiece that bends time and reality—a cry of outrage against oppression, greed, and assimilation.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780811238014
Publisher:	New Directions Publishing Corporation
Publication date:	02/06/2024
Pages:	672
Product dimensions:	7.90(w) x 5.30(h) x 1.90(d)

About the Author

Alexis Wright is a member of the Waanyi nation of the southern highlands of the Gulf of Carpentaria. The author of the prize-winning novels Carpentaria and The Swan Book, Wright has published three works of non-fiction: Take Power, an oral history of the Central Land Council; Grog War, a study of alcohol abuse in the Northern Territory; and Tracker, an award-winning collective memoir of Aboriginal leader Tracker Tilmouth. Her work has been translated into Chinese, Polish, French, and Italian. She held the position of Boisbouvier Chair in Australian Literature at the University of Melbourne between 2017–2022. Wright is the only author to win both the Miles Franklin Award (in 2007 for Carpentaria) and the Stella Prize (in 2018 for Tracker).

Editorial Reviews

"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. The sense is of Country cheerfully accommodating everything: high and low, chaos and epiphany, farce and deep time. Long after the lesser concerns of contemporary fiction have ceased to matter, the work of Alexis Wright will remain."

The Guardian (Australia) - Declan Fry

"Alexis Wright's Praiseworthy should be the last novel ever published: it's the ultimate expression of what fiction can do, a marvelous beast that gobbles and spits up all genres; whispers and screams and moans in all registers; and the vision of our world that it casts back in its distorted funhouse mirror seems more real than piddling reality itself. "

Stephen Sparks

"A book you don’t so much read but experience and inhabit ... Praiseworthy says plenty worth saying, perhaps in the only way it could be said. Praiseworthy indeed."

Buzz Mag - Joshua Rees

"An abundant odyssey that contains a formidable vision of Australia’s future. This is a long journey through the imagination, a novel both urgent and deeply contemplated…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 García Márquez."

The Age

"I’m immersed in the incendiary beauty of Alexis Wright’s Praiseworthy, a monumental novel that documents ecological catastrophe and Aboriginal lives in blistering prose."

The New Statesman - Preti Taneja

"A deeply contemplated novel concerned with issues of sovereignty, ongoing colonisation and climate change that is both timely and urgent. Praiseworthy is simultaneously satirical, comic, and lyrical. A work of stunning exhilarating sentences that builds to an extended elegy and ode to Aboriginal storytelling, lore, and sovereignty."

judges’ comments Queensland Literary Awards

"Praiseworthy blew me away…If you think you know what assimilation is, you should read Praiseworthy and think again."

Australian Book Review

"I’m awed by the range, experiment and political intelligence of Wright’s work: she is vital on the subject of land and people."

The New York Times Book Review - Robert Macfarlane

"[An] extraordinary novel … which reveals an Australia where myth and reality meet."

BBC Radio Four, Open Book - Chris Power

"A trippy, mind-blowing, allegorical, and powerfully political book, Praiseworthy takes you to another world (the small titular town of Praiseworthy, suffering under a haze cloud and under racism), and makes that world real and makes you care deeply. "

TANK

"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."

The New York Times Book Review - Samuel Rutter

"An impassioned environmental Ulysses of the Northern Territory. 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 Spectator - Ruth Padel

"There are few books in Australian literature more epic than Praiseworthy and few books as dense with poetry."

The Saturday Paper - Claire G. Coleman

"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. . . Wright has surpassed herself—Praiseworthy is the thing itself."

The Conversation - Jane Gleeson-White

"Praiseworthy is classic Wright: a book made of beautiful, mutable and playful language. . . These seven hundred-odd pages are chock full of stunning, exhilarating sentences that lead you around by the nose, taking you to some very unexpected places. Wright stretches sentences to their limits; when you think you’re over one sentence, sick of it even, you land on the most satisfying note."

Sydney Review of Books - Mykaela Saunders

"Wright has already proved herself one of Australia’s deepest and most urgent thinkers. In her new novel Praiseworthy, she synthesises the themes and forms of her past work—including Carpentaria, The Swan Book and Tracker—and arrives at a furious and dense epic satirising white Australia’s ongoing attacks on the colonised."

The Guardian (Australia) - Steph Harmon

"Incandescent… Praiseworthy 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."

The Guardian - Maya Jaggi

"Thoroughly original and refreshingly honest."

The Tyee - Ian Gill

"Like opera, Wright’s writing operates in many modes, not just satirical, but comedic, lyrical, absurd, a lament, a screed, a manifesto, and often within paragraphs or even sentences that wind on like the lines of migrating butterflies that flit through the novel. . . It is one of the most exhilarating reading experiences I can imagine."

The Library is Open - James Whitmore

2023-10-25
A sprawling mythic narrative of contemporary dysfunction and resistance.

Set in a small town in northern Australia sometime in the 21st century, this novel tells the story, in a fabulist mode teeming with plotlines and ancestral presences, of an Indigenous family’s response to climate catastrophe and longstanding abuse and neglect by a colonial power. Over roughly 700 pages, we track the fates of four central characters as a disorienting, lethal haze settles over their community. Cause Man Steel, the patriarch, becomes engaged in a manic quest to round up millions of feral donkeys as replacements for carbon-based transportation. His wife, Dance, plots an escape to China while enduring her community’s suspicions about her racial authenticity. Aboriginal Sovereignty, the elder son, disappears after embarking on an illicit romance which seems to confirm the prejudices of white culture. Tommyhawk, the younger son, plunges into an internet obsession and rejects both his family and his Aboriginal heritage in favor of the promises of government authorities. A dizzying range of storytelling modes are employed as the plot unfolds; the overall narrative may be thought of as something like a traditional songline or dreaming track, but it includes sections reminiscent of Western genres as disparate as science fiction, classical myth, romance, and melodrama. Among the insistent themes, which reverberate in sometimes startling ways, are the ongoing consequences of historical trauma on a colonized people and the failure of a settler culture to confront its ongoing culpability—and commit to reconciliation—in good faith. If one can keep up with the demands of this challenging book, the rewards are undeniable; what emerges at last is a shimmering vision of the legacy of colonialism in Australia, and the reasons for optimism in hoping for greater justice and autonomy for its Indigenous peoples.

A rich, dream-like journey through an Aboriginal mythos.

Kirkus Reviews