Shortlisted for the Miles Franklin Literary Award 2021

The Sydney Morning Herald/The Age ‘Pick of the Week’ for 14-15 November 2020

An Australian Book Review Book of the Year for 2020

• Purchase a copy through Booktopia, Amazon, or Book Depository, or your local independent bookstore.
• Read my essay on the ethical compromises of first-person narrative in Areo.
• Read my research notes at Necessary Fiction.
• Read my overview of what I was reading during the redrafting process at Meanjin.

• Watch my conversation with Anna MacDonald, at the online launch of the novel, or read a transcript of our discussion.
• Listen to my conversation with Nick Wasiliev on the Booktopia podcast.
• Listen to ABC Radio National’s Book Show on the Miles Franklin shortlist, featuring interviews with all the shortlisted writers.

• Read news coverage of the Miles Franklin Literary Award in The Guardian, the Sydney Morning Herald, or The Australian.
• Check out the ABC’s reading guide to the Miles Franklin Award shortlist.
• Read news coverage of At the Edge of the Solid World in the Port Stephens Examiner.
• Read news coverage of At the Edge of the Solid World in the Newcastle Herald.

Praise for At the Edge of the Solid World

There are, in a sense, many books in this single work, and their merging is gainful, like an alloy whose molten components are improved through complexity. … At the Edge of the Solid World is an unapologetically demanding work. It challenges readers in terms of both form and content: facing its graphic catalogue of violence, keeping account of its many moving parts, reckoning with its philosophical deadlocks, and, at the end of a reading session, escaping its obsessive hold. Most extraordinary is Davis Wood’s ability to blur the boundaries between narratives until, from their yielding, edgeless form, emerges a new shape.

— Naama Grey-Smith, The Australian Book Review (print and podcast)

In his second novel, Daniel Davis Wood weaves the complex stories of individuals and families with history and culture, space and time. … The ripple effects of all the events in this account of [the narrator’s grief] are tragic, but the tragedy is enfolded in love and acts of tenderness and memory. It’s not a comfortable read. But it is an extraordinary read.

— Jen Webb, The Guardian

Daniel Davis Wood is one of those surprisingly rare writers whose prose style and powers of observation do justice to each other. … One of the best things about this novel is the way it makes us think about the relationship between personal tragedies and human catastrophes on a grand scale.

— Kerryn Goldsworthy, The Sydney Morning Herald and The Age

Utterly original… a detailed study in grief and empathy. This beautifully written novel places individual and personal human grief in the context of various massive-scale real-life tragedies, tacitly making the argument that the former is not diminished by the latter.

— Australian Book Review Books of the Year

This novel does not bend to easy summation. On the surface it is about a man crippled by grief after the death of his newborn. But where other novels might cleave to a story of domestic drama — indeed his marriage does disintegrate — this one cleverly plumbs his inner world as he searches to understand this grief within the limitations of language and shared experience. … The narrator’s peripatetic mind investigates historical figures who’ve also grappled with loss and displacement, and the reader must tussle with the overlay of meanings this intellectually sophisticated novel animates.

— Sarah L’Estrange, ABC Arts

A significant literary achievement. … A powerful and deeply intelligent novel that probes the extremes of human experience, a text about which you’ll be thinking for a long time to come.

— Jeff Sparrow, The Saturday Paper

An ornate emotional vivisection… [The] chapters become intricately calibrated collisions, collapses in space and time… marvels of narrative engineering.

— Beejay Silcox, The Australian

A beautiful, formally ambitious and wrenching book about mourning and empathy — a wonderful follow-up to Blood and Bone.

— Adam Rivett, The Monthly

An artful portrayal of strong emotion, and of the functions and limitations of various kinds of empathy…

— Shannon Burns

A masterpiece.

— Pageturners

Exquisite and lyrical… dark and claustrophobic… brilliant and beautifully written.

— Neil Lucas, The Book Lover

Beautifully written, delving into grief and the way it fractures people’s lives…

— Michael Livingston, Goodreads

The best novel I’ve read this year. Intense, compelling, epic.

— Kim, Goodreads