Sydney Bridge Upside Down

'It holds in heartbreaking tension that point between innocence and experience, sanity and disarray that we recognize in works as disparate as Iain Banks's The Wasp Factory and Hal Porter's The Watcher on the Cast-Iron Balcony, in which the private catechisms of childhood and adolescence are translated into an adult tongue.'
Weekend Australian

'How did we fail to give this gripping, funny, desperately sad, great New Zealand novel, set "on the edge of the world", its due when it was first published in 1968?...Not until last year when l was urged to read it again did l fully understand what a masterpiece Ballantyne had pulled off.'
NZ Herald

'Sydney Bridge Upside Down is a gothic masterpiece that subverts many of the norms of realist fiction in a way that justifies its reputation as not only one of the most important local novels of the 1960s, but one whose terms seem clearer with the benefit of hindsight and thus resonate even more insistently today.'
Listener