Leading Australian book critic Geordie Williamson has reviewed This is How in the newspaper The Australian. The full review is here.
Here’s an extract:
Hyland’s writing, which has only increased in strangeness with each new book, emerges from a shifting of co-ordinates between cold-eyed clinician and artist’s empathetic heart. Her characters are constructed from the tension between autistic remove and panting proximity; her narratives energised by the insertion of wildly disturbed individuals into drab, constricted worlds. And her style? As Harold Pinter once said of his work, “What goes on in my plays is realistic, but what I’m doing is not realism.”
[...]
From the very beginning the reader is aware of a disparity between little details, of which the too-carefully calibrated doorknock is just the first of hundreds, and a deliberate vagueness about the bigger picture.
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