“Judas Boys is vivid and valuable. Brutal, too. Cheever with a boning knife”

“Judas Boys is brilliant on the brightness, mystery, terror and cruelty of adolescence – at times it reminded me of Lord of the Flies”

“This is a spare and elusive book. There is sleight of hand in the structure, which moves backwards and forwards in time and leaves copious space for readers’ imaginations. It will surprise no one that Deane is best known as a poet – the prose is winnowed, the settings evoked in cool noir-like detail ... Judas Boys certainly gives the middle finger to any lingering notion of noblesse oblige. Deane writes with seriousness and urgency and subtlety about people stunted by privilege, callously tearing themselves apart”

“Deane’s novel is an indictment of men like Pin, and darker forces at St Jude’s, but also of the social structures and institutions that make them – and thus underly the structure and dynamics of a damaged society and its values. A slender book, it’s both deceptively easy to read and fundamentally challenging; its elliptical nature asks the reader to do the work of filling its deliberate gaps ... It’s thoughtful and elegantly wrought – and lingers.”

“Deane excels at capturing the totality of trauma wrought from male violence ... The novel is an intense and devastating examination of violence and harm – first enabled by patriarchal institutions of power and then persisting decades later in victims – that resists any resolution by its end. Instead, it leans into ambivalence to remind us there are rarely easy fixes”

“Deane is no stranger to creating violent, misogynistic, dishonest, disloyal male characters ... The book is at its best in its lacerating depiction of masculine rites of passage and their consequences. At St Jude’s in the mid-1980s, an act of violence to rescue OB from a bully earns Pin respect, makes him ‘the talk of the school’, its ‘undisputed hard man’. OB, sensitive, artistic, receives merciless treatment due to rumours that he is the ‘bumboy’ of the Brothers, or Rasputins. OB’s chief tormentor is Cox. Yet while Pin does not like Cox, he recognises Cox’s power to shape the schoolyard narrative – a power that Cox will later wield in federal politics. After Pin spends the weekend at OB’s house, homophobic taunts fly. This fear of reputational damage overrides Pin’s fidelity to his friend. Deane’s raw, kinetic prose evokes the physical and emotional frenzy of what follows”

“Judas Boys’ power is all clean prose and restraint. Through careful telling, we learn the really brutal stuff has happened off the page. It is moving (and disquieting) to know that the ghosts of the past are fixtures”

“Deane has written a thoroughly mesmerising story about alienation and meaninglessness ... This novel is domestic noir at its best ... This beautiful novel is worth re-reading and re-reading. It’s that good”

“I was very impressed by how adroitly this was written … We’re being sited in a Generation X story of ‘where did we go wrong and how did we get so hurt?’ … This is a writer who is very much in control of the subtexts going on inside his work”

“I feel there is something Larkinesque about Joel’s work. It’s got that same brutal honesty; honesty to the point of being quite devastating at times. I really loved Joel’s last poetry collection, Year of the Wasp, and the new novel, which is called Judas Boys, ... it’s one of those books that puts its author completely on the line”

“It’s a powerful book ... This book also has one of the most charged first chapters I’ve ever read ... What you’ve got here is a scene of betrayal and regret and grief, but also it’s charged with lust and charged with human connection”

“We’re driven through this very muscular, very lean, dynamic book from the perspective of this person who is highly flawed, who is in the wake of catastrophe, and who is relying on all of these women that he’s treated badly to liberate him from that — and, in that sense, it is a feminist book”

“The book feels to me steeped in a melancholy. Not in a bad way. In a way that I found quite moving and quite engaging and quite compelling”

“I’ve just finished Joel Deane’s new novel Judas Boys. My goodness, it’s good and disturbing too. Deane scratches at the underbelly of betrayal and desire in this finely realised novel. Made me think of Tobias Wolff”