‘A compassionate book and not as bleak as the themes suggest… There might be a fine line between love and insanity, and Hillman’s characters travel a dark road, but this is a story about redemption and negotiating a place of peace inside despair.’ The Saturday Paper

‘Hillman allows both men the grace of redemption and the prospect of a better kind of happiness, complete with its scars. Joyful is exactly as it says, a great joy of a book. Robert Hillman is not making fun of grief but rather of his characters’ determination to wallow in their sorrow. It is a constant balancing act, skillfully enforced by Hillman and it makes reading Joyful an act of absolute pleasure.’ The Hoopla

‘A story of the greatest vitality, the most audacious imagination, the most original characters…Full of gems from the bowels of Hillman’s imagination that made me roar with unexpected belly laughing. I defy the reader to get through Joyful without shedding tears of mirth and tears of joy. In short, I like it. I admire it. I respect it, I envy it, I treasure it.’ Howard Goldenberg, author

‘While it may not be a novel’s main purpose, certainly one of its pleasures can lie in how it witnesses the history of the form itself…Robert Hillman’s Joyful is most immediately a nineteenth-century novel, a detailed work that portrays an entire, sealed world of complex and ultimately connected storylines.’ Australian Book Review

‘This calamitous work, brassy with the vigour of life in a specifically Australian, specifically contemporary way, singles Hillman out from the crowd. There is nothing around quite like it; no genre, no homage to acknowledge. Leon, in his journey towards acceptance of the duality of one life, is a memorable, even dear character, and I would have been happy to have read this glittering, noisy work for Leon alone. And for Susie...and for the happy ending.’ Sydney Morning Herald

‘Slightly crazed, this unconventional story is essentially two similar struggles, at once both funny and sad. They finally merge and find resolution.’ Otago Daily Times

‘Hillman has a carefully calibrated sense of the line between mourning and madness, and he plays it to the hilt… Hillman’s prose is a pleasure to read, elegantly alert to the paradox of strong feeling, full of poetry yet never entirely convinced by the absurd rhetorical gestures favoured by ruined men.’ Weekend Australian