Cirrus@Austlit

'In critical appraisals of Tony Birch’s fiction, certain adjectives appear again and again. Of the prose: “spare”, “concise”, “uncluttered”; the characters “vivid” and rendered with “compassion”. Perhaps it is true that good novels, like Tolstoy’s happy families, are all alike, yet it could just as easily be true that critics, by and large, tend to repeat themselves. Or perhaps, as I suspect, there’s an element to Birch’s writing that makes him both readable and difficult to define.'  (Introduction)