
Belinda Castles
REVIEWS
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Reading like an Australian Writer
‘The success of Reading Like an Australian Writer is heightened by Castles’ inspired arrangement of the essays, creating clusters and flow that enhance every piece. Many pairings speak lightly to each other...You’ll find your own windows upon windows into our literature. Reading Like an Australian Writer is a snapshot of Australian writing that is of its moment and, like the books in its pages, will reward rereading into the future.’ - Susan Wyndham, Sydney Morning Herald
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Bluebottle
‘Bluebottle is a tour-de-force, utterly assured, intricately designed and brilliantly imagined. This is a remarkable portrait of family anguish, gradually unfolded: engrossing, suspenseful and deeply moving.’ - Gail Jones
‘This is a stunningly written novel, atmospheric and yet claustrophobic. The novel moves between the past and the present, slowly unfolding the family’s secrets amidst descriptions of the beach so evocative that you can almost feel the sand and taste the water.’ - Good Reading
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Hannah & Emil
‘The most gripping passages of Hannah & Emil involve the fearsome prospect of Emil losing his young son, Hans, to the terrible ideology of Nazism and here Castles writes with great poignancy about the corruption of innocents.’ - Lucy Clarke,
The Australian
The River Baptists
‘The stories of [the characters] eventually intersect as they unfold in a beautifully structured manner that allows intense and even shocking dramas to develop, but never produces sensationalism.’ - Debra Adelaide, Australian Literary Review

Belinda Castles is the author of Walking Sydney: Fifteen walks with a city's writers and novels Bluebottle, Hannah & Emil, The River Baptists and Falling Woman. Her novels have won the Australian/ Vogel and Asher Literary Awards and been longlisted for the Stella Prize, and she has been named one of the Sydney Morning Herald‘s Best Young Novelists. She is also the editor of Reading Like an Australian Writer and a Senior Lecturer in Creative Writing at the University of Sydney.
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