‘How did we fail to give this gripping, funny, desperately sad, great New Zealand novel, set “on the edge of the world”, its due when it was first published in 1968?…Not until last year when l was urged to read it again did l fully understand what a masterpiece Ballantyne had pulled off.’ NZ Herald

‘It holds in heartbreaking tension that point between innocence and experience, sanity and disarray that we recognize in works as disparate as Iain Banks’s The Wasp Factory and Hal Porter’s The Watcher on the Cast-Iron Balcony, in which the private catechisms of childhood and adolescence are translated into an adult tongue.’ Weekend Australian

In all good bookstores now