Description: "The book is both devastating and very funny. Considered either apart or together, she has created two potent, memorable voices and stories . . . It's just what long-time fans of her work might expect and hope for: sad and angry, playful and smart in equal measure . . . Her work has such incredible integrity of purpose, generous and open even as she is dissecting and prosecuting the world's injustices and inauthenticities." --Michael Williams, The Guardian "Language is not benign in Scary Monsters . It is the sanitization of language that enables this society to enact violence on its most vulnerable. The sweep of de Kretser's critique here includes us all." --Gretchen Shrim, The Australian "In yet another masterful work, de Kretser has pulled out her recipe book and remixed her ingredients into a strong, hallucinatory brew that might make us taste fear and anger before it's too late." --Susan Wyndham, Sydney Morning Herald "De Kretser [is] one of our most acute chroniclers of migrant experience, and a savage critic of white Australian complacency." --Geordie Williamson, The Saturday Paper " Scary Monsters will resonate most with humans who enjoy a well-told-tale, especially post-modern feminists with a penchant for literary intertextuality." --Nanci Nott, ArtsHub "To read Michelle de Kretser's fiction is to sense important details swimming under the surface of our awareness . . . For readers of this novel, the implicit task is to make a seemingly fractured story whole, to locate or construct points of connection between parallel worlds, to warm the pages with our close and imaginative engagement. There is an implied moral dimension to this challenge, but the ultimate result is our readerly delight." --Shannon Burns, Australian Book Review "De Kretser's cutting wit and dexterous ability to dismantle Australia's rose-tinted idea of itself makes this an inventive, satirical and confronting exploration of the migrant experience. Scary Monsters is sure to hold strong appeal for literary fiction readers." --Carody Culver, Books + Publishing "In Scary Monsters de Kretser addresses the weightiest of subjects with the lightest and deftest of touches, and the result is funny, playful, painful, angry, and, above all, ferociously smart. It's a dazzling novel, by a hugely talented author." --Sarah Waters " Scary Monsters is a novel of luminous intelligence and profound depth, written with verve, humor, and exceptional elegance." --Monica Ali " Scary Monsters is a marvel. Each of the two very different parts of the novel had me totally riveted, intensely absorbed, wowed by de Kretser's scathing accuracy--whether she's chronicling youth's delights and distortions or a future where prosperity is the new 'unethics.' It's a wildly remarkable book that unfolds like no other." --Joan Silber, author of Secrets of Happiness and Improvement "Written with incandescent moral energy, boundless compassion, and astonishing precision and beauty, Michelle de Kretser's Scary Monsters extends the very possibilities of the novel form. On the contemporary international scene, there are very, very few writers who can match her style, her intelligence, her vision. To read her is to be changed." --Neel Mukherjee, author of A State of Freedom " Scary Monsters is a radically brilliant diptych novel, in complex conversation with itself and with the world we live in, written by one of the living masters of the art of fiction. A beautifully troubling book." --Max Porter, author of Grief Is the Thing with Feathers and Lanny

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