From The Age Saturday 16th April 2005

Review by Cameron Woodhead

Champions of young local writers are few and far between, and Total Cardboard Press is to be applauded for bringing to light a strong new talent. Daniel Gloag's Waking up with Strangers concerns the denizens of a share household in Sydney, and reads like a cross between the nihilistic comedy that is John Birmingham's He Died with a Felafel in His Hand and its saccharine and stagey TV love-child, The Secret Life of Us. There's Rogan, a Pom artist with a shady past; Jade, his Melbourne squeeze; Adrian, a single dad whose uber-socialist partner has left him for Lenin; and Simone, a sexually ambigous drifter who works in a condom factory. The first 50 pages of Gloag's fiction is brilliant - the writing sparkles, his characters charm, and he creates a wonderful sense of the restlessness of youth. The brilliance is not sustained, alas. But even Blind Freddie can see that the author has a huge gift. It will be interesting to see what he does with it next.

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