Praiseworthy
ABOUT
THE BOOK
In a small town in northern Australia dominated by a haze cloud, a crazed visionary sees donkeys as the solution to the global climate crisis and the economic dependency of the Aboriginal people. His wife seeks solace from his madness in the dance of moths and butterflies. One of their sons, called Aboriginal Sovereignty, is determined to commit suicide. The other, Tommyhawk, wishes his brother dead so that he can pursue his dream of becoming white and powerful. Praiseworthy is a novel which pushes allegory and language to its limits, a cry of outrage against oppression and disadvantage, and a fable for the end of days.
2024 JUDGES’ COMMENTS
Alexis Wright’s Praiseworthy is a wonder of twenty-first century fiction. This modernist more-than-an-allegory about a pernicious haze that settles over a northern Australia town yokes a painfully contemporary tale of political, social and climatic disaster to a narrative consciousness embodying 65 000 years of aboriginal survival. Intimate while epic, the family drama at its center reads like chamber music on a symphonic scale. Wright has authored a blisteringly funny book, replete with situations and speech that elicit wild laughter—a laughter through tears we may recognize from our readings of Beckett and Kafka. She has also written a beautiful one: time and again Praiseworthy delivers unforgettable images, from ‘aerial rivers’ of dancing butterflies to hordes of stinking donkeys. Startlingly original, fiercely political, uncompromising in every respect, Praiseworthy expands the possibility of the novel form.
‘Funny and fierce, Alexis Wright’s Praiseworthy is a wonder of twenty-first century fiction. This modernist more-than-an-allegory yokes a painfully contemporary tale of political, social and climatic disaster to a narrative consciousness embodying 65 000+ years of aboriginal survival.’ — Daniel Medin, 2024 Dublin Literary Award Judge
NOMINATING LIBRARY COMMENTS
Praiseworthy is electric. Each sentence unfolds unexpectedly and pushes the reader to sit in something that glimmers elegiac, polemic, earthy, lyric and theatrical. As a craftsperson, few can match Wright. Her use of language is dazzling in the truest sense of the world – bewildering and surprising with brilliance. Wright incorporates literary references and Marquezian magic realism with techniques drawn from the long traditions of Aboriginal storytelling. The story layers issues of climate change and environmental destruction on the violence of colonisation and concept of sovereignty and pushes readers to wrestle more deeply with their understanding of these things.