Reviews

‘Australia’s finest writer’
The Australian

“Though Malouf’s sparingly deployed details, vigorous language, and sly wit humanize these tragic heroes, the story is unmistakably epic and certainly the stuff of legend.”
—Publishers Weekly (starred review)

'Ransom, his first novel in 10 years it must be said at once is a masterpiece, exquisitely written, pithy and wise and overwhelmingly moving, constructed with invisible, successful craft that leaves the reader wondering how in the world it had been done. ... fiction, in Malouf's hands, becomes the art of rendering the world coherent. For this we must be grateful.
Alberto Manguel, Australian Literary Review

‘In austere, elegant prose that subverts Homer’s Iliad in significant ways, David Malouf has created in Ransom an imaginative terrain that is both new and old.’ Rod Jones, The Age

“I thought I'd just dip back into Ransom and read a couple of pages. I didn't get out of there again. The way he caresses you, he just he caresses you and surprises you. It's still one of the great moments in writing in this country in the last 50 years. There's a moment in Ransom, where you just sit up and go, "God! I can't." I love surprise. I love surprise. And it has one of the great surprises in it. “
David Marr, First Tuesday Book Club

‘The sheer potency of this slim volume can hijack your senses and emotions.’ The Courier Mail

‘This book shines new light on this story of the Trojan War, adding twists and reflections as well as flashes of earthly humour.’ Brisbane News

“ ... lithe, graceful and deeply moving tale ... These pages of Ransom are nothing short of magical. Malouf’s prose is delicate, marvellously alert to the natural world and endowed with a quality that has one name only: wisdom. There is something Shakespearean about this section: not the Shakespeare of the great speeches but those quiet moments …when time stands still and the nature of life is mysteriously disclosed.’
Andrew Riemer, The Sydney Morning Herald

“Malouf’s rendering of Ancient Greece is gorgeous, fantastical, and yet earthly, humble and relatable.”
Australian Bookseller + Publisher

“the prose is consistently fine. Malouf is incapable of an ugly sentence. The style is so sure, so unostentatious, that we can overlook how good it is ...”
Peter Rose, ABR

"By the time Nikos Kazantzakis completed his sequel to The Odyssey, in 1938, The Iliad had shown itself to be better suited to our imperilled, capsizing world. The twentieth century's wars were fought under the sign of Homer's epic. Rupert Brooke recited The Iliad on the troopship to Gallipoli, and ecstatically anticipated a death that would eternalise his name ... Now David Malouf's meditation on one small episode from The Iliad in his novel Ransom gives the epic a renewed relevance."
Peter Conrad, the Monthly

“David Malouf, one of Australia’s most admired writers, has taken a sliver of Homer’s ILIAD and augmented and embellished it. The result is a beautiful tale that acknowledges its place as a fragment in a larger narrative yet stands alone.”
Nina Caplan, Time Out

“David Malouf’s retelling of the final chapters of Homer’s ILIAD stands alone as a magnificent tribute to the poetic strength of its tumultuous source and a quietly poignant critique on the futility of war. This is a great story in its own right ... But Malouf’s beautiful language puts fresh flesh on to these characters.”
Claire Allfree, Metro

“ ... a work of immediacy, humanity and tenderness. Malouf succeeds beautifully in transporting the reader into the world and thought patterns of archaic Greece and then in part subverting them. His elegant prose is delightful.”
Philip Parker, Financial Times

“David Malouf has written a rich, moving and sometimes disturbing novel, one to read, as it demands, in a sitting and then to return and read it slowly.”
Allan Massie, The Scotsman

“The themes of this apparently simple, yet immensely moving, modern novel are still vast: loss, forgiveness, love and redemption. Lyrical, witty, gentle, this is above all a story of transformation.”
Elizabeth Speller, The Independent

“David Malouf writes with the voice of a poet; his graceful fiction deals in truth and is always beautiful. RANSOM is a dignified performance. Here is fiction as art, epic re-imagined as a simple tale of a father fulfiling his duty. Serious questions are raised: honour, grief, retribution, mortality. In writing this novel Malouf is honouring a great work and also making it his own.”
Eileen Battersby, The Irish Times

“David Malouf’s RANSOM [is] a wonderful retelling of the encounter between Achilles and the Trojan King Priam in prose that’s so good you want to eat it.”
Mariella Frostrup, The Guardian

Just a short email to tell you how much I enjoyed `Ransom’ by Malouf. The blurb on the back of the book said something about finishing the short novel and then immediately starting it again, which is exactly what I did.
The language and imagery is just wonderful – I loved it. If we have a greater writer in Australia, I don’t know who it is!
Talk to you soon, and again, thanks for the reading copy.
Lyn, Coaldrake’s Bookshop

“. . .I have been lucky enough to read an advance copy of David Malouf’s first novel in more than 10 years, Ransom (due in April) – a powerful, visceral and haunting revisiting of Hector’s Troy. It’s a thrilling reworking of a classic subject.”
David Gaunt, Gleebooks

Why read a retelling of a classic of Western literature? Read David Malouf’s latest to find out. Beautiful and so very lyrical, Ransom is Malouf’s version of Homer’s Iliad, delving primarily into the relationships between men in the midst of a long and bloody war.
The great Greek warrior Achilles mourns the death of Patroclus which spurs him on to defile the body of the heroic Trojan, Hector. Hector’s father King Priam, grief-stricken, resolves to ransom his body with treasure from his kingdom’s coffers. And along the way, another man, the humble cart-driver Somax who bears Priam to Achilles, becomes an unlikely ally to the king. This is simply stirring writing. With great sensitivity and insight, Malouf explores the bonds between fathers and sons, husbands and wives, comrades in arms, and men of different stations in life who have been thrown together with a common purpose. What could have been an overly masculine story, in Malouf’s hands, becomes a compelling novel about grief, love and pride that will resonate with every reader. Read it slowly and savour every word.
Kabita Dhara, Readings Carlton