The Tall Man

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 a half years, and she does their complexity a remarkable justice.

New York Times

A compelling human story.

Sydney Morning Herald

With a fine-tuned curiosity, a probing capacity to interpret people and their motives and an at times forensic yet lyrical attention to detail, Hooper has written a confronting and perplexing tale.

Adelaide Advertiser

Observant, acute and compassionate ... It would have been easy for Hooper to make The Tall Man a simple story of apparent injustice. Always, however, she favours nuance over cliché, context over judgement ... While absorbed in the back and white of guilt or innocence, Hooper is also drawn to the grey.

Time Australia

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

[Hooper's] ambition - and achievement - is breathtaking.

Morag Fraser, The Age

The north has chosen to reveal itself to Chloe Hooper.

Paul Toohey, Weekend Australian

The Tall Man follows in the tradition of classic non-fiction novels like Truman Capote's In Cold Blood as Hooper brings lyrical power to actual events. The result is a real life Heart of Darkness in the Australian badlands.

Time Out Sydney

Hooper tells this story masterfully, and her perfect pacing keeps the pages turning.

Sunday Telegraph

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 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

If this woman is a mesmerising novelist, she also has the nerve and the passion of a serious journalist. She is the antipodean Joan Didion, the Truman Capote of our times.

Alice Nelson, Western Australian

It is beautifully written and is an extraordinary picture of not only the events themselves, but of something unresolved at the heart of Australia society.

Judy Horacek, The Week

The north has chosen to reveal itself to Chloe Hooper.

Paul Toohey, Weekend Australian