The Tall Man Reviews
'Tall Man will pull you in atom by atom and haunt you ... Ms Hooper tells this story carefully and ingeniously, constantly turning it over to explore new facets. She sees the world through alert, appraising eyes.'
New York Times
'Hooper followed the case and its main characters for two and half years, and she does their complexity a remarkable justice ... And though there is no resolution, she makes of it all an extraordinary whole.'
The New York Times Book Review
'She constructs in painful detail how the lives of two 34 - year - old Australian men collided, with tragic results ... Her spare but polished narrative, through understatement and detail, gathers force like a river after rain ... It's a rich vein for a writer and few could mine it better. A rising star.'
Andrew Rule, Sunday Age
'The book is everything it should be: a sad, beautiful, frightening account of one man's pointless death, interwoven with the brutal history of Palm Island and a golden thread of Aboriginal mythology. Every sentence is weighed, considered, even, restrained. Every character is explored for their contradictions, every situation observed for its nuances, every easy judgement suspended. Hooper has a feeling for the intimacy of violence, the fragility of the flesh, the tawdry inevitability of corruption, the fathomless depth of loss... It is The Tall Man's triumph that Hooper finds the common humanity in the accused and the accuser, the police officer and the street drinker, the living and the dead. It's Australia's good fortune that Boe found Hooper to shadow him.'
Mark Dapin, Good Weekend, Sydney Morning Herald
'Riveting'
Courier Mail
'The book is everything it should be: a sad, beautiful, frightening account of one man's pointless death, interwoven with the brutal history of Palm Island (which grew up as a penal settlement for "disruptive" Aboriginal people) and a golden thread of Aboriginal mythology. Every sentence is weighed, considered, even, restrained. Every character is explored for their contradictions, every situation observed for its nuances, every easy judgement suspended. Hooper has a feeling for the intimacy of violence, the fragility of the flesh, the tawdry inevitability of corruption, the fathomless depth of loss.'
Good Weekend Magazine, Sydney Morning Herald & The Age