“This novel is really breathtaking in its freshness, originality, and structural ingenuity.”

—Madison Smartt Bell, 2016 First Novel Prize Judge and author of All Souls’ Rising.

“In her phantasmagorical and compelling novel, Rebecca Winterer employs a Dreamtime all her own to sing an Australian family into existence. Not since Karen Joy Fowler’s Sarah Canary have I seen such a striking debut.”

—Andrea Barrett, National Book Award-winning author of Ship Fever

Rebecca Winterer’s novel, The Singing Ship, offers a depth and span of storytelling that simply amazes. Multiple stories vividly unfold in these wise, funny, wonderful pages set in a small town in Queensland. And always a single story asserts itself, breaking your heart wide open: the eternal story of leave-taking and all the entailing stories of love and loss that spill from that one story. “Sometimes time stalls,” says one character here, “or you stall, and your every day is the same – day in, day out – until one day something changes.” In this remarkable novel, you will newly experience how time sings, changeless and changing, through the human comedy.

—Kevin McIlvoy, Novelist, At the Gate of All Wonder (Tupelo Press).

To enter the world of Rebecca Winterer’s Pilgrim family is to go somewhere familiar yet foreign, a world where art, history, devotion, and denial are in constant communication. Like Audrey Pilgrim, Winterer has created a work of art that reflects the world around her in ways as unexpected as they are revealing.

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–Peter Turchi, author of Maps of the Imagination: The Writer as Cartographer

What a terrific read! Between the phenomenal language, the way I was caught by surprise (in the best possible way), and the uniqueness of the voice, I knew – instantly – this book was one of a kind. I couldn’t put it down and you won’t be able to either.

–Goldie Goldbloom,  author of Gwen, The Paperbark Shoe, and  You Lose These

Sisters Bernadette and Jane never speak about the day before Bernadette left for college, even as it drives them apart and defines their lives. A sophisticated debut.

                                                                                               –PEOPLE MAGAZINE