Australia
Due Preparations for the Plague won three
of Australia's major literary prizes:
• the $25,000 Queensland Premier's Literary
Award for Fiction
• the $20,000 Patrick White Award
• Davitt Award for 'best crime novel of
the year by an Australian woman'
• Shortlisted for Adelaide International
Festival Award
• Shortlisted for Christina Stead Prize
for fiction
• Listed in 'Best Books of the Year' by
The Age in Melbourne and The Sydney Morning Herald
Janette Turner Hospital's astonishing novel is
both contemporary international thriller and literary tour de force.
Due Preparations for the Plague investigates the shadowy worlds
of terrorism and intelligence while also exploring the psychological
trauma these worlds deliver to their victims. Constantly innovative
and authentic, this is a brilliant novel for our disturbing times.
— Citation of judges for Queensland Premier's
Literary Award
The Australian-born US-based Janette Turner Hospital
fuses postmodernism and noir...
She takes incendiary subjects and, through the refuge of fiction,
makes them touchable and safe.
A novelist of cool intelligence... her labyrinthine
plot, which shifts breathlessly through time and space... owes less
to Tom Clancy than to Jorge Luis Borges.... At the heart of horror,
Turner Hospital finds an unlikely note of loveliness – and
salvation of sorts through storytelling... Due Preparations
for the Plague offers consolation in times of terror.
— Time Magazine
(full page lead review)
A densely layered tale of international terrorism,
political intrigue and deceit in the mode of John le Carré,
although more claustrophobic in its intensity... a thriller with
existential underpinnings that attends to the big question of the
human condition and the nature of evil itself.
— Sydney Morning Herald
Janette Turner Hospital writes so passionately
about death, you instinctively know she is in love with life. Due
Preparations for the Plague carries you on a fast trek through
the dark alleys of terror, love, loneliness and living.
— The West Australian
A complex, multi-layered work with a plot that
functions beautifully in its own right, but one that is also a mechanism
for a profound exploration of the most important questions we ask
ourselves. The plot is so topical as to be frightening. It is also
about the greatest of existential questions: how do we live? how
do we maintain hope when we know we are going to die? How do we
prepare for the plague?
— The Age, Melbourne
Canada
Toronto Globe & Mail 'Best Books
of the Year'– listed in the Top 10 books of 2003
Move over Twain, DeLillo and Franzen. Janette
Turner Hospital remakes the American social novel. Thrilling, maddening,
deeply moral, Due Preparations for the Plague is a near flawless
novel, and one so timely it is breathtaking.
— Toronto Globe & Mail (front
page review)
Janette Turner Hospital's new novel has been getting
across-the-board raves the likes of which haven't been seen since
Don DeLillo's Underworld... The book achieves that rare
combination of timeliness and timelessness, all the more impressively
by making the two seem one and the same...
We are never allowed to forget that terrorism's
impact, for its victims' loved ones, never really dissipates....
What's hard to convey in a review of this length is Turner Hospital's
feat of broadening what could have been a superior, LeCarre-esque
thriller, filled with compelling characters and white-knuckle episodes
– which it is – into a wide-ranging philosophical examination
of how we, as a society and as individuals, deal with mortality....
While it looks without blinking into some of the darkest corners
of the human condition, the effect, as in any great work of art,
is finally uplifting.
— Montreal Gazette
(lead review)
France
LIRE [click
here for review]
Le Monde [click
here for review]
Livres Hebdo [click
here for review]
Enfant, du côté de Brisbane, en
Australie, Janette Turner Hospital vivait dans une famille intégriste,
limitant son horizon au ciel et à l'enfer. Depuis, la fillette
a pris le large, mais ses livres restent imprégnés
de ces deux mythes extrêmes. Dernières Recommandations
avant la peste met en scène une prise d'otages sur le vol
Paris-New York. Les terroristes laissent
sortir les enfants tandis que les adultes sont parqués dans
un bunker. Il n'y aura aucun survivant. Quinze ans plus tard, les
enfants rescapés ressassent leurs cauchemars et échangent
des nouvelles sur un site Internet. C'est alors qu'ils s'aperçoivent
qu'on assassine discrètement tous ceux qui s'intéressent
de trop près à cette tragédie...
Influencée par le Décaméron,
de Boccace, et La Peste, de Camus, Janette Turner Hospital situe
son histoire à plusieurs niveaux : celui des rescapés,
qui ne supporteront jamais de vivre avec ce souvenir morbide. Celui
de la peste moderne, cette folie des enlèvements et de la
mort hasardeuse. Celui de la raison d'Etat et des sacrifices qu'elle
exige. La romancière parvient ainsi à construire un
véritable roman d'espionnage, lui adjoint une
réflexion sociale et politique, tout en racontant des histoires
sentimentales, celles d'hommes et de femmes qui tentent de dépasser
leur douleur. Entre le ciel et l'enfer.
—Christine Ferniot, Télérama
n° 2860
Israel
"But I think randomness, the maddening neatness
of randomness. Yes, I think the geography of chance is the ultimate
teaser, intellectually and morally, because of the sheer enormity
of divergence that results from a micro-change here and a micro-change
there."
This poignant statement, which applies as easily to the days of
the bubonic plague as it does to New York City in 2001 or Israel
today, is a testament to Turner Hospital's masterful grasp of her
novel's dark subject.
— Jerusalem Post [click
here for the full review]
Netherlands
This complex and exciting novel takes us to a
world of terrorists, fanatics, secret agents,
hijackers and kidnappers. Janette Turner Hospital reveals the victims'
traumas with great psychological insight. Thanks to her lyrical
pen she manages to create beautiful stories
out of guilt, destruction and paranoia and even though they are
told to keep the death at bay, eventually they crawl quite close
under your skin!
— Adriaan van Dis
Misdaadromans
| Crimezone
New Zealand
A tour de force... complex, riveting, timely and
quite brilliant. Turner Hospital's skill in creating the skewed
universe of intelligence is so impressive I can't help wondering
if she herself, in the course of her research, came under surveillance.
But in the end what sets this novel apart from its more pedestrian
counterparts in the terror/intelligence genre is its insight into
the mystery of dying, and the extraordinary connections that are
made when a group of people face certain death.
— New Zealand Herald
Spain
Criticas
Literarias Regina Irae
United Kingdom
A powerful and atmospheric political thriller....
In elegant and restrained passages, Turner Hospital examines the
preparations for death, weaving her meditation out of the way in
which the final victims make amends, showing that reparation and
preparation are inextricably bound together. Epigrams and quotes
from sources as diverse as Bunyan and Camus, Defoe and the Bible,
remind us that living with death and making due preparations is
part of the human condition. Camus wrote that a tale can "be
only the record of what had had to be done, and what assuredly would
have to be done again in the never-ending fight against terror";
in an echo of this, the relationship between generations is seen
as a balance between reparation for wrongs done and preparations
for what is to come.
— Times Literary Supplement, 2
January 2004
What you get when a writer of the calibre of Hospital
turns to the thriller is high literary art smuggled as contraband
inside the commercial form: a climate of Camus or Kafka inside a
plot spectacle that is more Clancy or Grisham... Hospital has tapped
into current anxieties about air travel (and subtextually, the future
of the literary novel) and created a very poignant, very intelligent
and very frightening book.
— The Times, 17 January 2004
Due Preparations explores not just the
edgy world of covert operations but the long-term psychological
impact of a terrorist attack... A conventional thriller would have
concentrated on the hostages' heroic efforts to escape a peculiarly
gruesome captivity... Turner Hospital does something quite different,
confronting horror with the stately pace of ritual.... It is these
extraordinary scenes that make the novel so memorable, lifting it
from the realm of the thriller into a meditation on the human spirit.
— Sunday Times
What distinguishes this book from other espionage
thrillers is Turner Hospital's chokehold on her characters' psychology.
She turns the interrogation lamp of her prose on each in turn.
— Daily Telegraph
This thrillingly pacy read is not only an account
of government corruption, but a deeply-felt examination of family
life.
— Eve Magazine
United States
Best Books of the Year: San Francisco Chronicle
Independent Booksellers Recommendations: Top
10 picks in Book Sense 76
Borders Bookstore Magazine: Listed in
Top 6 Picks 'Original Voices'
When a writer of this caliber takes on subjects
of espionage, terrorism, and political intrigues, the result is
a book that keeps the reader engrossed.... And one is left with
the question, again, of how much do we really know about events
that happen in this world?
— Book Sense 76
Hospital is a writer of many gifts; her dark imagination,
astute insights into societal interactions and the supple beauty
of her prose, provide an irresistible combination.... Hospital's
sophisticated psychological thriller offers a thought-provoking
glimpse of the sociopolitical intricacies of the individuals and
organizations that track terrorism, as well as of the enduring personal
struggles of those left behind after an attack.
— Publisher's Weekly
(starred review)
Although it sounds like a high-concept thriller,
Hospital's novel is nothing like that. Jumping between multiple
characters' points of view, she focuses not only on the horror of
the actual events but also on the even more terrible horror of how
such events force us to face the world... but the pain is never
gratuitous or sensationalistic. Hospital asks us to confront a world
where government "intelligence" has become the ultimate
weapon of mass destruction, but she shows us that destruction in
the most intimate terms.
— Booklist (starred
review)
Superficially a thriller in the clever Continental
manner of John le Carré, Due Preparations for the Plague
shows what can happen when a serious artist gets her hands on a
fictional genre.
What's most chilling in this bracing visceral
thriller is the way Hospital continually locates, in inhuman events,
the unyieldingly human experience.
— San Francisco Chronicle
Hospital has wrought from tragedy a life-affirming
tale, asking a highly personal question that arises from public
tragedy: "How do we ready ourselves for what might happen tomorrow?
What possible preparations can be made?"
— Los Angeles Times
Insidious in mood and sinuous in style, the works
of Janette Turner Hospital are richly imbued with a highly lyrical
and luminous quality. ...With the blunt-force beauty of seamless
language... Hospital masterfully raises the big questions in a compelling...
mesmerizing manner, drawing in the reader to a riveting degree.
— San Diego Tribune
An act of terrorism is the specter that haunts
the maddeningly real characters in Janette Turner Hospital's brilliant
novel Due Preparations for the Plague. With terse, erudite,
yet affecting prose, Hospital permits us to live through the rippling
ramifications of such acts and to know that the plague for which
we must prepare has been created by our brethren. With its deliberate
echoes of Homer, Defoe and Boccaccio, her novel also helps us better
understand the events of our time by allowing us to share the anguish
of those who died and those who are left behind.
— Boston Globe
Unputdownable, this literary suspense tale is
perfectly attuned to the national mood ...and does for the post-September
11 era what John le Carré did for the Cold War.
— Time Out Magazine, New York
International terrorism and chilling realpolitik
combine with deeply human stories in this stunning literary thriller,
a powerfully contemporary novel with echoes of Dante, Defoe, and
Camus.
— Borders Bookstore
Due Preparations for the Plague is this
year's definitive political thriller. Turner Hospital remains impassioned
and smart the entire way through, keeping the pace and the effort
at stampede pace at at all times... an uncompromising literary force.
It is also enlightening, touching and stunning.
— www.popmatters.com/books
A mesmerizing tale of grief, mystery and revelation.
An intense, riveting reading experience that explores the overlapping
worlds of national security and international terrorism.
— Book Page, Nashville, TN
Tomorrow KCRW's Bookworm interviews Janette Turner
Hospital, whose extraordinary fiction is beginning to gain recognition
in America. Her latest novel is Due Preparations for the Plague
(Norton, $24.95). PW thought it was a fine prescription of fiction
for this day and age, writing, "In this age of global terrorism,
Hospital's sophisticated psychological thriller offers a thought-provoking
glimpse of the sociopolitical intricacies of the individuals and
organizations that track terrorism, as well as of the enduring personal
struggles of those left behind after an attack."
— Publishers Weekly Daily (Booksellers
'Authors on the Air' segment)
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