‘Anxious, elegiac, dreamlike … It’s really about freedom, about characters searching for something to believe in before they jettison the rest. It reads like a requiem — for family, planet, hope for the future — bittersweet and played for laughs, last drinks after the funeral … The lesson of this book about freedom might be that self-sufficiency doesn’t exist — that freedom is other people.’
Imogen Dewey, The Guardian
‘The emotional texture is compelling and ultimately quite moving. Allinson’s prose throughout is alert, nuanced and capable of great variety. It’s a formally ambitious novel, but perhaps its boldest move lies in its rejection of closure — with each new section we learn more, but feel less certain … It’s Allinson’s ability to capture the disappointments of children and the failure of parents without lazy generational summarising that gives In Moonland its diffuse, but lingering, power.’
Adam Rivett, Sydney Morning Herald
‘[In Moonland] is beautifully told … and heart rending in its accumulation of losses that can never be retrieved and dreams that can never be realised.’
Barry Reynolds, The Herald Sun
‘While the novel indulges in our fascination with cults, the relationships between the characters are the main drivers of the story. Each character is a seeker in their own right, and if they aren’t tapping into the mystical they are trying to unlock generational trauma. For all that, Allinson’s new novel has more in common with work by writers like Peter Carey rather than Tim Winton. It’s taut, unsentimental, thought-provoking, sad, and at times wild and gorgeous.’
Brigid Delaney, The Guardian
‘A story of our hearts, all broken, full, mystifying. Observant, sublime prose.’
Tara June Winch, author of The Yield
‘Wild, tender, fatalistically hilarious, and utterly enthralling. Allinson’s complex insight and love for the people of this novel renders them as real as difficult kin and just as inescapable.’
Josephine Rowe, author of Here Until August
‘In Moonland contains everything I want from a novel. It’s heart-breaking, funny, ruthless, and in the final section takes an enormous risk that works so perfectly that any other conclusion seems impossible. I love a finely turned sentence, and this book is awash with them.’
Robert Gott, author of The Orchard Murders
‘A thrilling novel about filial obedience, yearning, and failing that shows three wildly different journeys, exposing the battered and bulging heart that propels each. Like the best, it has me wondering how my own heart is propelled.’
Tim Rogers
‘In Moonland is not only beautifully and fluently written, but paced with expertise and subtlety … [Miles Allinson has] the mark of an empathetic person capable of piercing artistic insight [and] In Moonland polishes this insight to jewel-like quality, and lingers, beautifully, after its plot has passed away.’
Vanessa Francesca,
ArtsHub, starred review
‘This is a terrific novel about fatherhood, mortality, the unreliability of family stories and the fractured nature of reality.’
ANZ LitLovers
‘[S]tunning … A novel in parts, traversing three generations and multiple viewpoints, In Moonland is a meditation on family, emotional inheritance, memory and belief. It’s also about the power of the stories we tell ourselves about who we are and where we come from: how, rather than reflecting an objective truth, they can shape, trap and free us. And while its ideas and structure are complex, Allinson’s prose reads with the ease of a knife through warm butter, at times echoing the crisp, wry vulnerability of Helen Garner.’
Jo Case, InDaily
‘A novel that plumbs the vicissitudes of what we call family and what we call love … It is the work of a novelist more in touch with the potential of the form than I have seen in a long time. For this reason, it achieves something that might be called artistic: it reads as an intervention into our times, not as a symptom of it.’
Jeremy George, Readings
‘[In Moonland] is richly peopled with flawed characters, thematically complex, narratively diverse and in each of its different sections delivers a great sense of time and place.’
Robert Goodman, Pile by the Bed
‘The emotional texture is compelling and ultimately quite moving. Allinson’s prose throughout is alert, nuanced and capable of great variety. It’s a formally ambitious novel, but perhaps its boldest move lies in its rejection of closure – with each new section we learn more, but feel less certain … It’s Allinson’s ability to capture the disappointments of children and the failure of parents without lazy generational summarising that gives In Moonland its diffuse, but lingering, power.’
Adam Rivett, The Sydney Morning Herald
‘In Moonland [is] masterful in its restraint: there is a sense of mystery and unanswered questions which resonated long after I had put the book down.’
Christine Kearney, The Canberra Times
‘[In Moonland is] a novel about the ways we yearn to belong; a deeply moving excavation of faith, autonomy, identity and, ultimately, mortality. Allinson writes with great warmth and insight, his exquisite prose offering light to even the darkest corners of his characters’ hearts.’
Judges comments for The Age Book of the Year Award for Fiction
Praise for Fever of Animals:
‘The play between truth and fiction, between the writing self and the self written, is one of the great pleasures of Fever of Animals… audacious, clever, and original’
Australian Book Review
Praise for Fever of Animals:
‘This is the book on everyone's lips right now … Offbeat and superbly written.’
Canberra Weekly
