The Washington Post

“Finely honed structurally and tightly textured, it's a wry, romantic story that should make Anderson's American reputation and create a demand for her other work.”

Claire Corbett, Overland

“I loved this book and think it expresses brilliantly so many dilemmas of its time and place: the sense of never feeling at home pervading settler culture in Australia; the related sense that real life is always ‘elsewhere’ but that even when you arrive ‘elsewhere’ it still escapes you; the way this becomes bound up with the romantic yearnings of young women to escape, to realise the self.”

erryn Goldsworthy, Australian Book Review

“For a short novel, Tirra Lirra by the River is extraordinarily rich in content and meaning, so densely layered in its characters, incidents, sense of place, cultural references, and symbolism that the experience of reading it is almost closer to the experience of reading poetry than of reading fiction. And it is as intricately structured and patterned as a poem.”

Susan Sheridan, Australian Book Review

“Like the story of her namesake in Ibsen’s A Doll’s House, Tirra Lirra calls out to be read as a woman’s novel in the feminist sense of representing, from the perspective of a particular woman’s subjectivity, female experiences such as sexual initiation, the struggle for economic independence, abortion and ageing. It was certainly read that way during the 1980s, the decade when women writers and feminist questions dominated the literary scene. Yet such is its richness, this short novel has also been read as a quest (as the title suggests, there are Tennysonian echoes of the Arthurian legend), as a novel of city life and as a post-colonial text.”

Anna Funder, Sydney Morning Herald

“Nora is cursed with wanting life and art both - desires that in Brisbane in the early 20th century could not speak their name, and that are probably pretty difficult to reconcile without a lot of collateral damage, in any life. Indeed as I write this, in time bought from a babysitter, bargained from my husband and stolen from my children, the risk of collateral damage feels closer than I'd like. And yet, right now, what I find myself most yearning for is a nice, high tower all of my own.”