The Blazing World

I have told nearly everyone I love - and some random acquaintances - to stop whatever they are doing and read THE BLAZING WORLD… Hustvedt’s novels have always been smart, accomplished, critically acclaimed but this one feels like a departure. There is more heat in it, more wildness; it seems to burst on to a whole other level of achievement and grace - Financial Times

Her prose is brilliant, furious, teeming with intelligence and life - an experiment in reception itself. - Literary Review

…there is something special about this book; THE BLAZING WORLD is an intellectual puzzle from the moment you pluck it from the bookshelf. Intricate, sensory and challenging, the book does in fact blaze. - The Big Issue, Australia

Fans of Hustvedt’s bestselling WHAT I LOVED will recognise both the themes (art, identity, gender) and the author’s showy brilliance. - Jennifer Byrne for Australian Women’s Weekly

The rigorous and arresting BLAZING WORLD both demands and welcomes. While the novel gains richness in direct relation to its reader’s fluency in art, literature, neuroscience and gender studies, Hustvedt’s allegiance to the importance of the body alongside the mind causes it to throb with an array of love stories and uncanny mysteries. - The Saturday Age, Melbourne

THE BLAZING WORLD works best when Hustvedt gets the balance right and manages to shroud Burden in tantalising mystery rather than smother her in a fug of opacity. It is here that we can appreciate the novel as an intoxicating “anthology of voices”, an inventive portrait of the artist and a searing critique of the way we see and judge. - Weekend Australian