SOURCE: Abel, Betty. Review of Turning Back the Sun, by Colin Thubron. Contemporary Review 260, no. 1513 (February 1992): 101-03.

In the following excerpt, Abel offers a positive assessment of Turning Back the Sun.

In Colin Thubron's remarkably imaginative novel, Turning Back the Sun, the two places which he recreates are unreal but at the same time impressively realistic. Existing in an unidentified country, they possess characteristically Australian attributes with alien overtones of political coercion in terms of pass laws and work permits. A shabby, dry frontier town is the centre of the action but the capital city which we never visit is fertile in everyone's nostalgic memories as well as being physically by the water's edge. Typically hinterland country leads out only to the wilderness where the aboriginal natives regard the encroaching town with incomprehension and continue their more important rituals in spite of the apparent sophistication of the disenchanted...