Winner of the 2024 James Tait Black Prize - Fiction
Winner of the 2024 Stella Prize
Shortlisted for the 2024 Dublin Literary Award
Winner of the 2023 Queensland Award for Literary Fiction
Shortlisted for the 2023 Queensland Premier's Award for a Work of State Significance, Queensland Literary Awards
Longlisted for the 2024 Miles Franklin Literary Award
Longlisted for the Climate Fiction Prize
In a small Aboriginal town dominated by a haze cloud, which heralds both ecological disaster and a gathering of the ancestors, Cause Man Steel is chasing a mad vision: a national donkey transport scheme that will guarantee his people's independence forever. He finds, however, as he bundles feral donkeys into his Ford Falcon and dumps them en masse in the cemetery, that not all of Praiseworthy agrees. Outrage ferments at his desecration of traditional land, while Cause's wife Dance seeks refuge with butterflies and dreams of moving their family to China. Bad feelings reach fever pitch when citizens catch wind of the suicide of Aboriginal Sovereignty, Cause's eldest son. All are distraught - all, that is, except eight-year-old Tommyhawk Steel, who, with his brother gone, gleefully pursues his dream of becoming white and powerful. Told with the richness of language and scale of imagery for which Alexis Wright has become renowned, Praiseworthy is a marvel of explosive sentences, a shock to allegory, an outraged cry against oppression, and a biting satire for the end of days.
'I'm awed by the range, experiment and political intelligence of Alexis Wright's work. She is vital on the subject of land and people.' Robert Macfarlane, New York Times Book Review
Industry Reviews
'The great Moana Jackson declared the doctrine of discovery a legal fiction. In Praiseworthy, farce, satire, tragedy, the colloquial, myth, pun, repetition, elegy, and the epic expose the absurdity of the doctrine and the everyday lies, habits and horrors keeping it in place. Praiseworthy is simply astonishing.' Judges of the 2023 Queensland Award for Literary Fiction ---- 'I'm awed by the range, experiment and political intelligence of Alexis Wright's work. She is vital on the subject of land and people.' Robert Macfarlane, New York Times Book Review ---- 'Monumental. Praiseworthy blew me away. If you think you know what assimilation is, you should read Praiseworthy and think again.' Tony Hughes-d'Aeth, Australian Book Review ---- 'Linguistically commodious, panoramically plotted, Praiseworthy's 700-plus-page scale would have given Henry James a heart attack: it is a baggy monster, and more monstrous than most. Its vision is dark, humour tar-black, narration irrepressible, language roiling and rococo. All life, as in Balzac, is here ... 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 ... Long after the lesser concerns of contemporary fiction have ceased to matter, the work of Alexis Wright will remain.' Declan Fry, The Guardian ---- '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 Garcia Marquez.' Jack Cameron Stanton, The Age ---- '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.' Jane Gleeson-White, The Conversation
