Bobis lives in Australia but is vitally concerned with her birthplace, the Philippines. She can do what very few authors here dare - mix magic realism with the political.The book is dark, angry and powerful. For the Stella Prize, at least.

To read Fish-Hair Woman is to enter a kind of entrancement, at once strange, haunting, beautiful and terrifying. This is an extraordinary novel of compelling originality in which we learn that testimony is solidarity and that the loss and retrieval of any story of historical suffering implicates us all ...

As I was reading my thoughts kept turning to Wide Sargasso Sea. It shares with Jean Rhys’s masterpiece more than just a threat to topple into tragedy, but Fish-Hair Woman takes a wider view. It is a love story, a murder mystery, a story about family and a story about the impact of the kind of self-perpetuating government corruption that so often befalls a country in political turmoil. It’s ambitious and sprawling, and things could quickly go wrong. Fortunately, they don’t. Bobis is a talented, passionate writer who is unafraid of exploring the storytelling potential of the novel.

Merlinda Bobis writes with passion and poetry about individual and collective suffering. This is an unforgettable tale of violence and love, of brutality and community, a sad and eloquent song for those who have disappeared. Its remarkable register – from visceral realism to high mythology – underpins a truth not often noticed: that language is never futile.

...I love the idea that the magical is metaphorical. For instance, Estrella’s hair is memory. It grows a hand span each time she remembers. Memory makes the people who have disappeared re-appear...Although language cannot give the dead back their flesh, Bobis fleshes out characters to save their stories about the Total War. She is a talented writer, ethical and passionate about her work, and I’d recommend Fish-Hair Woman.

It’s part war story, murder mystery, political thriller, romance, and historical epic. It draws on the magical realist tradition of writers like Isabel Allende, but overarching all this, it is a book about stories – about the stories we cleave to ourselves and the stories we tell others, the stories that convey the truth and the ones that hide it, the stories that change with time and those that never change...For all the sadness and brutality in this book, it has a big heart. And its message is clear. We are all in this together. How much better if we see it sooner rather than later.

Fish-Hair Woman is about passion, loss, and tortured souls blended with the elements of intrigue and mystery. It’s also a novel of war and human suffering, a timely reminder to this reader. I could hardly put it down.

...The language and imagery is evocative; the tropics are dense, humid and gorgeously drawn. Just when the book verges on too much lushness, a sense of unease creeps back into the writing with its harsh, honest recounting of the ‘total war’ in the Philippines. Fans of Barbara Kingsolver’s fiction, early Isabel Allende and those interested in South-East Asian politics will appreciate this book.

Bobis's character of Estrella is a fascinating way to literalise the burden of grief. She is born bald, but Estrella's hair begins to grow after a near-death experience, its growth triggered by painful memories... Bobis tests the reader's imagination with such a magical character, but crafts Estrella's voice wonderfully to render her believable. The detail of her unique dialect is exquisite...Bobis continues her bilingual tradition of including Filipino language in the text. This gives a transcendent, other-world quality to the manuscript and deepens it authenticity. Although details of the war can be shocking, this is a romantic and optimistic novel that will not disappoint fans of magical realism or Bobis's earlier work.

Instead of leaving the reader to absorb the words off the printed page, Bobis injects them as if hypodermically into the listener...In a complex narrative that took Bobis 15 years to complete, magic, dreams and mysteries proliferate, and even when she blows them away with gusts of televisual realism, they remain in the air.