Gigantic! Enormous and fulfilling - on every level!, March 16, 1999
Reviewer: leew.mailcity.com from San Francisco
Clearly it's hard not to get carried away on this one. This author is so steeped in place and subject and so skilled in crafting a human canvas uniquely suited to this locale and litany of experiences that anyone associating major Australian fiction with paulhoganist one-dimensional pap needs to read this book.
It's easy to raise comparisons to Dostoevsky and Kings Row and War & Peace and Gone With the Wind and The Sundowners, but yet in some respects these comparisons appear dwarfed when held up as standards by which to evaluate the enormity and all-encompassment of the piece at hand.
Fourth Book in the Southern Swallow Series finds the Academician Li K'ai-men in exile on Hai-nan Island. China has a new invasion threat. A showdown between ingenuity and technology explodes as the Sung Dynasty tries to preserve itself.
