Critical reception:

Reading like an Australian Writer

• Sydney Morning Herald
  Susan Wyndham, May 2021
  ‘The success ofReading Like an Australian Writeris heightened by Castles’ inspired arrangement of the essays, creating clusters and flow that enhance every piece. Many pairings speak lightly to each other...You’ll find your own windows upon windows into our literature.Reading Like an Australian Writeris a snapshot of Australian writing that is of its moment and, like the books in its pages, will reward rereading into the future.’

• The Canberra Times
  Lucy Neave, May 2021

  ‘Reading like an Australian Writer…offers a form of remediation by recognising the importance of Australian books to our culture, while also expanding and including a wide range of Australian voices and subject positions. Most importantly, in its essays’ discussion of books ranging from David Malouf'sRansomto Michelle de Kretser'sThe Life to Come, it communicates the experience of how reading can spark a connection between the reader and the text, and how this connection in turn inspires more writing. In its discussion of a range of novels and collections of stories, in essays written by writers who have themselves won literary awards and been recognised as significant, from Debra Adelaide to Roanna Gonsalves to Julienne van Loon, it maps the fabric of Australian literary culture now.’

Bluebottle

• Stella Prize judges’ comments
  ‘Bluebottle is a dexterous, assured work of a rare kind: a literary novel with the mesmerising force of a thriller…The precision of Castles’ observations, her attentiveness to nature and her remarkable understanding of family dynamics make this novel outstanding. Central to Castles’ achievement is the formidable sense of menace she creates around Charlie, which brings The Man Who Loved Children to mind.’
• The Australian
  ‘an elegantly crafted, psychologically complex novel that takes up the motif of the dysfunctional family haunted by its past, and renders from it a story that is gripping and incredibly moving.’

Hannah and Emil

• Sydney Morning Herald
  Peter Pierce, October 2012
  ‘This is an ambitious novel that keeps its focus on the here and now, on the hard-to-manage particulars of daily life. The sentimentality to which its form and events could have succumbed is altogether avoided for a clear-eyed, absorbing and intelligent account.’
• The Australian
  Lucy Clark, August 2012
  ‘The most gripping passages of Hannah & Emil involve the fearsome prospect of Emil losing his young son, Hans, to the terrible ideology of Nazism and here Castles writes with great poignancy about the corruption of innocents.’

The River Baptists

• The Australian Literary Review
  Debra Adelaide, October 03, 2007
  ‘The stories of [the characters] eventually intersect as they unfold in a beautifully structured manner that allows intense and even shocking dramas to develop, but never produces sensationalism.’
  ‘Castles exploits deep and telling silences in her story, and portrays people intensely connected to place and land…’
• Australian Book Review
  Kate McFadyen, September 2007
  ‘The persistent symbolism of baptism and rebirth is delicately handled, from the title of the novel to the final pages. Castles uses the quietness of the river, its distinctive hidden waterholes and inlets, to great effect…The dramatic backdrop at once feeds the symbolic world of the novel, diluting it with its immensity and the comparative smallness of human concerns.’