'A bold performance. Lyrical, precise, mysterious. The retelling of a familiar story that gets less and less familiar as we read.'

David Malouf

Kevin Rabalais is a very fine new writer. Reading his work put me in mind of a young Michael Ondaatje — daring, musical, intelligent and out on the edge.

Colum McCann

'A truly remarkable achievement.'

Alex Miller

'Kevin Rabalais's The Landscape of Desire deeply impressed me. The elegant lyricism of his prose about a harsh land and the grisly end to the Burke and Wills expedition is finely judged.'

Robert Dessaix (The Sydney Morning Herald )

'With cool authority Kevin Rabalais decants the heady brew of sexual repression and personal ambition that fueled the Victorian mania for expedition. Time is fluid and as lethal as the landscape in this richly detailed, affecting, and elegiac novel.'

Valerie Martin

' It will reward anyone who enjoys the use of fact has a basis for well-wrought, poetic fiction. With its balance of elegant language, plot-driven action, contemplation and thematic seriousness, it is a very likely feature on 2008 literary awards shortlists.'

Max Oliver (Australian Bookseller & Publisher)

'An extraordinary feat of dexterity and imagination.'

Claire Sutherland (Herald Sun)

'This is a beautiful story, intensely evocative, with long-buried secrets gradually, tantalisingly revealed.'

Mary Ann Elliott (Toowomba Chronicle )

'The Landscape of Desire has a cinematic quality.'

Simon Caterson (The Age)

'This is a brilliant, ambitious novel by a fine new writer.'

(The Big Issue)

'Author Kevin Rabalais' has written a remarkable debut novel in which he has imbued the figures with thought and feeling, rounding and colouring them so they no longer stare flatly at us, but become flesh and blood.'

Natasha Mirosch (Courier Mail)

'The Landscape of Desire is an assured and forceful novel; an exquisite book that, once you've begun reading it, you'll find it very hard to drag yourself away from.'

Diane Stubbings (Canberra Times)

'Landscape of Desire is a stunning debut and an impressive attempt to give our colonial history some mythic resonance ... nearly brilliant.'

Mary Vernon (Townsville Bulletin)

'Immediately we are transported through the minutiae of the explorers' treasured items into 19th century life ... the book's expansive, rhetorical quality is well suited to the tragic nature of the Burke and WIlls story.'

Johanna Leggatt (Sun Herald)

'Fact or fiction, this is a moving look at a remarkable chapter in our history.'

Cecily Ryan (Daily Telegraph)

'visionary fiction'

Steven Conte

'The Landscape of Desire is the story of people trying to find their way in a new place. The images of horizon are everpresent and the spectre of what lies out there' is thrilling, andchilling, in equal measure ...For all its poetry this is a page turner ... The writing mesmerises and I recommend the book for this alone.'

(Byron Shire Echo)