Fanatic Heart

Keneally presents an exemplary hero with unforgivable flaws. But he does so much more. His picture of an Ireland of the 1840s, of the Tasmania of that time and of the still recently colonised and independent US all draw the reader in as if the mid-19th century were just yesterday and as real as ever a yesterday is. You don’t need me to tell you Keneally is a brilliant storyteller, but with Fanatic Heart he proves it once again.

Erich Mayer, Arts Hub

Many Australian readers now may never have heard of Mitchel; Keneally’s feat is to have brought him back to life and to have recreated the fraught circumstances that made the complex man – and the remarkable woman, Jenny Verner, who was his wife. It’s the fine grain of Keneally re-imagining, and the ironic sparkle of his prose that carries his panoramic novel, strobe-lit as it is from the start by an epigraph from Yeats: “Out of Ireland have we come./ Great hatred, little room,/ Maimed us at the start./ I carry from my mother’s womb,/ A fanatic heart.” And the novel’s resonance for our own times is deafening.

Morag Fraser, The Sydney Morning Herald

From the splendid opening line, this novel reads like no ordinary tale of the Irish potato famine.

The Times

Meticulously researched and full of compelling historical detail . . . a gripping and resonant story.

Financial Times