When Colts Ran

Editorial Reviews

"An epic tale', McDonald works on a grand scale and with a lyric intensity that makes his every sentence arresting. When Colts Ran, with its cavalcade of flawed, rough cut Australian characters, illustrates poignantly the way the optimism and confidence of rural Australia in the middle of the twentieth centrury slipped away and how family experience, class and social expectation shaped communities, McDonald evokes that world with an inwardness and poetic verve that is extraordinary." - Judges 2011 Miles Franklin Award

"In When Colts Ran, Roger McDonald has boldly re-invigorated one of the most popular forms of Australian fiction—the saga of pioneering, land-taking and nation-building. Familiar material of the saga—struggle on outback sheep stations, family feuds sustained across the generations, the experience of foreign war, the ravages of drought—is enlisted with a freshness and verve that indicates both McDonald's inwardness with this literary tradition, and the originality with which he reshapes it. The novel is also a meditation on heroism, on the loneliness that gregariousness can mask, on a lostness of spirit that cannot be assuaged." - Judges Prime Minister's Literary Awards

"The novel’s richness of characters and incidents is extraordinary, as is McDonald’s control over a narrative that seems to have little shape yet reveals remarkable coherence. McDonald pulled off that feat by means of the novel’s supple, allusive, often ironic but never sarcastic tone. His diction - the storyteller’s voice - is unlike anything else in contemporary Australian writing. The individuality and distinction of McDonald’s diction reside in his compressed but always ludic style." - Andrew Riemer, The Sydney Morning Herald

"McDonald’s prose is dense and heady stuff. Rich, beautiful and magnificently flawed." - Geordie Williamson, The Australian

"Like many fine authors Roger Mcdonald will have you gasping at his use of the English language. You will want to re-read whole passages. He has a piercingly observant style as he charts the ups and downs of Australian sheep farming. His characters experience the abundance and hardships in life just as the land does. The descriptions of the characters and the land are both beautiful and flawed. This is such an Australian novel, you must read it." - Chris Page, Pages and Pages

"Triumph ... A virtuoso prose performance. It is both precise in image and expansive in the subject to which it gestures. It is McDonald’s finest work and clearly one of the novels of the decade." - Peter Pierce, Australian Book Review