Why We Are Here

It’s about loss and about community, about the relationships we form with dogs, and the solace they can offer when we’re feeling broken. I loved it

Michael Williams, Read This

Why We Are Here is the funniest-saddest book about death you are likely to read this year. Observant, imaginative and vaguely allegorical, Doyle’s writing will resonate with dog-people, anyone familiar with the abyss known as grief, and everyone who has experienced their own personal aftermath.

Nanci Nott, Artshub

I have read a lot of good books this year, but i think this is my book of the year. It touched the soul.

Ben Hunter, Tell Me What To Read - Australia's Biggest Book Club

Why We Are Here is an elegiac interior novel best described by Rachel Yoder in her cover-quote, “big hearted, soul-searching”. In long walks with her dog, Baby, across the coastlines and golf courses of gentrified Silver City (a stand-in for Sydney), BB reckons with loss and healing, in dialogue with those who’ve left her and the authors who came before. It’s also a love letter to a dog, and to all dogs, who will sit with us on a rock by the ocean when we need them most.

Steph Harmon, The Guardian

This novel has no right to be as funny as it is!

Gina Rushton

Brilliant and tender, Why We Are Here is a riveting study in grief, waywardness, and renewal. By turns raw, funny, intellectual, and searching, here is a book that mines the depths of human suffering and lights the way forward with the gems it finds. This is the big-hearted, soul-searching novel I’ve been waiting for.

Rachel Yoder

I devoured it - very Maggie Nelson but with more laughs

Katy, The Leaf Bookshop

A feat of grief, longing, trust and connection, Briohny Doyle’s Why We Are Here is a masterpiece of raw courage – shot through with the humour, heart and more-than-human understanding that is central to Doyle's work. The novel has the intimacy and surprise of a companion-animal relationship, deeply familiar and unforgettable.

Laura Jean McKay

A glorious ride – moving, hilarious, wild, fluid, deadpan. A study in loss and letting go that loops effortlessly between grief, uncertainty and simple joy.

Luke Davies, author of Candy, Lion and Beautiful Boy

In this timeless novel that is somehow also a novel of our times, Briohny Doyle has packed in all you could want in a book, humour and brilliance, joy and yearning, pain and glory, sex and rage.

Ronnie Scott

Written from piercing depths, Why We Are Here finds a shimmering space between love and death, stasis and escape, kinship and seclusion. This astonishing novel sets new bearings for Australian fiction in the 2020s. Doyle is on fire.

Rebecca Giggs

This is a novel after my own heart: a timely testament to the solace of art, nature, and the singular bond between a woman and her dog. With graceful precision and profound insight, Why We Are Here reckons with what it means to grieve in a world that continues to be in crisis and offers a deeply moving reminder of the value of love, even when loving inevitably means risking loss.

Madelaine Lucas, author of Thirst for Salt

Why We Are Here is a book of capacious wisdom filled with deep insights and luminous prose. Briohny Doyle’s third novel is a strange, heart-wrenching and joyous story about love, loss and the restorative power of dogs, friends and nature.

Chloe Cooper, Bookseller + Publisher

While in some ways not much happens in this novel, in other ways everything happens. The way this woman uncovers her stories and memories, analysing them at the same time, is moving and intellectually engaging. She withholds, reveals a bit, conceals other things entirely. And if I was discomfited to realise that some of this story might be true, rather than invented, it was only because it was so beautifully told. I felt as exposed as that cliff in a gale on the edge of a supposedly fictional Australian place called Silver City.

Kate Evans, Radio National

I loved this novel. An elegant heart-wrenching delve into grief, loneliness, love and literature. PLUS - dogs! What's not to love?

Morgan, Gleebooks

A brilliant new novel about grief, life during lockdown, and the overwhelming love of a dog. [Doyle] chooses to only answer with the light and love that life still has to offer despite how lost we become in the dark: the friends we meet, the new sparks of love we feel in our hearts, or the great privilege it is to have felt a dog’s love. These are the reasons why we are here, and every small joy can give us the greatest sense of fulfilment and meaning.

Aurelia Orr, Readings

Although in part a ‘lockdown novel’, Why We Are Here is a lot more fun than you might expect. BB’s observations are wry and often exceptionally funny. Doyle can stare the most staggering of losses in the face without flinching. But while an unflinching encounter with grief is important, so too a return to the world, to pack walks and packed cinemas. Why We Are Here is multiple things—grief survival handbook, lockdown chronicle, autofiction, philosophical study of ‘aftermath’ as chronicled in art, literature, cinema and the lived experience of one woman and her dog. It’s also a wildly relatable account of deep mid-life reflection.

Dion Kagan, Meanjin

I’m very smitten with it. Doyle’s pitched the surreal edge and philosophical bent of the novel perfectly; it could’ve landed in vague and dissociative, but the characters feel specific and personal, and the sense of searching feels real and important – so do the flares of joy.

Sylvia, Roaring Stories

Heartbreaking but hilarious, this book demonstrates the profound connection between a woman and her dog.

WHO Weekly

Existential, moving and hilarious. A heartfelt exploration of grief and renewal told through the cinematic and surrealist prose of an author at the top of her game.

Samuel Bernard, The Australian

A deeply interior (and, in fact, often funny and delightful) work that takes the reader into the mind of a grieving, isolated woman. When nothing and everything happens in a novel, the feeling is a gentle, meandering sense of drift. It can feel directionless, but there’s also a lovely kind of flow, helped by Doyle’s evocative, unhurried prose.

Giselle Au-Nhien Nguyen, The Age

I read many novels this year. My favourite was Briohny Doyle’s Why We Are Here, a story of love, disabling grief, and the raw courage of the novel’s protagonist, 'BB'. This is a book I will return to again and again.

Tony Birch, Sydney Morning Herald's Best Reads of 2023