“What’s most striking about Marlo is its quiet dignity, the lightness of touch with which Carmichael tells this story, which is about recognition and discovery as much as it is about love. Christopher’s unfolding realization—that in order to come of age he must also cast himself out—is never cause for him to abandon his optimism and his willingness to hope for and work for a life and a love, however unsanctioned, of his own making. Carmichael’s reclaiming of a sidelined history is defiantly hopeful too, resisting tragedy and seeking out forgotten joys instead.”
Fiona Wright
“Through rich language, Carmichael portrays sparkling drag clubs and dark back alleys in a way that feels at once enchanting and perilous … The relationship between Christopher and Morgan illuminates conversations about gender and race: as an Aboriginal and a gay man, Morgan lives an even more dangerous life, and this intersectionality is engaging … Marlo is a character-driven novel about the harsh realities of being queer in Australia and what it meant to fight for love during a time when the world fought back.”
Allison Janicki, Foreword Reviews
“Queer lives were dangerous, so hidden and coded. They are hard to retrieve. Jay Carmichael himself notes that his project is ‘a task of inference’ … [Marlo's] style is spare, with use of actual photographs to create a mood both bleak and secretly joyous. It depicts past Melbourne as alien as a distant planet.”
Lucy Sussex, The Sydney Morning Herald
“Carmichael traces a hopeful story of two men trying to carve out some small corner of domestic peace that allows for joy. Even in its brevity, Marlo offers a glorious peek into historical gaps that were far from uninhabited.”
Stephen A. Russell, The Saturday Paper
“Carmichael’s second novel is a noble exercise in mapping lived but seemingly lost Australian queer histories. With its unfettered prose, Marlo is a quiet and earnest story of gay male desire and longing.”
Nathan Smith, Books+Publishing
“This novel, written with controlled retrospective fury and pain, is interleaved with archival black and white photographs of Melbourne, of known beats at the time and of particular parties. The photographs—grim, poignant, essentially dull—resonate. As does the novel. This was us? Indeed, it was.”
Helen Elliott, The Monthly
“My only complaint is that Marlo left me wanting more.”
Sarah L'Estrange, ABC News
“[A] powerful, moving novella … Marlo reminds readers that the battle for equality is a continuum with a history.”
ANZ LitLovers
“Marlo affords a great opportunity to learn about past gay lives.”
Ivan Crozier, The Newtown Review of Books
“Carmichael’s poetic second novel Marlo [is] a perfectly crafted story of love between two men set in conservative post-war Melbourne … [it] “makes history immediate, every page pulsing with heart and sensuality”.”
Judges' comments from the Sydney Morning Herald Best Young Australian Novelists Award
Praise for Ironbark:
“Jay Carmichael's Ironbark does the extraordinary. It achieves what we readers want from the best of fiction: to tell a story anew, and to capture a world in all its wonder, ugliness, tenderness, and cruelty. This is a novel of coming of age and of grief that astonishes us by its wisdom and by its compassion. It's a work of great and simple beauty, so good it made me jealous. And grateful.”
Christos Tsiolkas
Praise for Ironbark:
“Jay Carmichael approaches the world as a poet, from an angle that is all his own. He reveals a hidden, pulsing reality beneath the surface of the everyday.”
Miles Allinson, author of Fever of Animals and In Moonland
Praise for Ironbark:
“In sparse and quiet prose, Jay Carmichael’s debut is an enveloping novel about grief, survival, and the futility of finding peace in a place you don’t belong.”
Shaun Prescott, author of The Town
