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Outstanding
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Booklist Brad Hooper
What begins as an intelligent but somewhat emotionally sterile story... grows in tension, becoming an absolutely breathtaking demonstration of dictatorship: how it works, but more importantly and resonantly, the strategies necessary to live under it.[15 May 2004, p.1579]
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Outstanding
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Boston Globe David Mills
One of the novel's strengths is that it is replete with riveting dilemmas. A novel with numerous "predicaments" can feel congested, but this plot breathes, allowing Keneally to detail grief's emotional architecture.
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Outstanding
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Kirkus Reviews
Brilliant, riveting, conscience-driven political novel: rank it with the greats.
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Outstanding
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Publishers Weekly
This is an exquisitely wrought study of moral corruption in a convincing -- and frighteningly modern -- political dystopia.
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Outstanding
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The New York Times Book Review Terrence Rafferty
The power of a novelist can be intoxicating too, and this sneakily profound book shows how even a writer as fundamentally unheroic as Alan Sheriff can avoid that sad habituality, the potentially lethal illusion of mastery.
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Outstanding
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The Spectator Caroline Moorehead
What gives The Tyrant's Novel its tense, edgy tone is the implicit understanding of the exile that is to come, the sense of being sucked without alternative towards flight.
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Favorable
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The New Yorker
Though concerned with current events, Keneally takes care to give his tale wider resonance.[28 June 2004]
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Favorable
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The Guardian Alfred Hickling
Whether intentionally or not, The Tyrant's Novel has the feel of a book written in a hurry. This enhances the urgency with which Alan wishes to put his story across, but it skims over the fine details that would give the account real credibility.
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Favorable
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The Independent Ian Thomson
Ultimately, The Tyrant's Novel reads like a preliminary sketch, not the "Orwellian fable" the author claims. Nevertheless, the book lingers in the mind as a forceful essay on the corrupting tendency of power.
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Favorable
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The New York Times Janet Maslin
Its most impressive aspect is Mr. Keneally's quicksilver way of switching moods, shifting from light to dark and back again, as he captures the utter precariousness of life subject to a tyrant's whims.
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Favorable
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Los Angeles Times Brigitte Frase
A timely and deeply honest book.
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Favorable
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Entertainment Weekly John Freeman
A story as timely as it is disturbing.
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Favorable
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Chicago Sun-Times Allison Block
Keneally peppers his lean prose with vivid, sharply drawn characters.
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Mixed
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Daily Telegraph Tom Payne
But the plot doesn't take a dramatic shape -- the ending adds nothing to the tale -- and worse still, the prose is crook.
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Mixed
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Houston Chronicle Patrick Kurp
It's a pretty good book, never stupid or cynical and seldom boring, that could have been better had its author, the Australian Thomas Keneally, dared to confound us and jettison his desire to please right-minded readers.
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Unfavorable
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Washington Post David Rieff
The greatness of Keneally's theme is not matched by his ability to turn that theme into fiction; and, as a novel, it is hard not to judge the book a failure.
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