Riders in the Chariot

"[A] monumental work [of more than] half a thousand pages - almost every one of which cries out for quotation." - New York Times

"Riders in the Chariot is the most compassionate and the most beautiful of all Patrick White’s works; colours fly everywhere; his words, comic, ecstatic, are like the brushstrokes on a canvas." - Carmen Callil and Colm Tóibín, The Modern Library: The 200 Best Novels in English Since 1950

"This is a book which really defies review; for its analysable qualities are overwhelmed by those imponderables which make a work 'great' in the untouchable sense. It must be read because, like Everest, 'it is there'." - Guardian

"The outstanding figure in Australian fiction." - New York Times

"Stands out among contemporary novelists like a cathedral surrounded by booths. Its forms, its impulse and its dedication to what is eternal all excite a comparison with religious architecture." - Sunday Times

"A poetically vivid narrative... It is a finely written novel with a rare flavor." - Pittsburgh Post-Gazette

"Patrick White is an outsider, and his characters are outsiders, outlaws, afflicted, and linked by their affliction. The visionary element in his novels is inseparable from a tough irony and a microscopically close, sometimes savage attention to physical minutiae. The coarser the texture of the physical - of bodies especially - the more likely to be illuminated by flashes of meaning and power." - Rosemary Dinnage