From Publishers Weekly
Starred Review. Malouf, who won the Commonwealth Prize for his novel The Great World, is a master storyteller whose imagination inhabits shocking violence, quick humor, appealing warmth and harsh cruelty with equal intensity. Three previous collections (Dream Stuff, etc.) and a section of new work comprise this engrossing compilation of the Australian writer's shorter work. Several stories are rooted in that continent's hardscrabble interior and coastal enclaves; others are set in Australia's past. The youthful dreams, physical desires and psychic despair of Malouf's richly varied characters, however, are wholly universal. Older standouts include The Prowler, about suburban hysteria in the wake of an omnipresent rapist's ability to evade capture, and Lone Pine, among the collection's shortest stories but packing a horrific punch, in which a carefree holiday couple is murdered by a crazed young man. New stories include The Valley of Lagoons, about a young man's searing coming-of-age when he's allowed to join his peers on a tradition-rich hunt, and Elsewhere, which follows a sad rural father who ventures from the country to Sydney for his estranged daughter's funeral. Readers won't want to skim a single page of the 31 stories in this epic collection, a few of which are novella length. Together, they represent a quarter-century of a formidable craftsman's career.
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Copyright © Reed Business Information, a division of Reed Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.
From Booklist
A "complete stories" volume is an honor, which this Australian writer well deserves. Malouf's contribution to the short story form has been significant and not simply an incidental exercise to his work in the novel form (which was also done exceptionally well). Born in 1934, he often uses his Australian background as a boy growing up during and after World War II, with a father off to war, as material for his stories. His rich, precise style is a carryover from his early career as a poet. Readers will find him a traditional—old-fashioned, if you will—short story writer, in that his stories are not simply brief glimpses of characters embedded in their peculiar circumstances but, instead, more developed pictures of the how's and why's of those particular circumstances. That is not to say Malouf lacks creativity in form and structure; in fact, he treats the spacial proscriptions of the form as a challenge to find the best way to elucidate his exploration of character. His insight into psychology is acute and expressed in beautiful metaphors. This compilation is to be savored over time. Hooper, Brad
