The Georgia Straight
This novel is so replete with sleights of narrative, with eccentric characters, with astonishing insight… that to praise it is to become an exercise in superlatives.

Vancouver Sun
Bits of metaphor or information nearly buried in one story reappear like flotsam in another, go down again into the roll of words, only to rise again later. Like a flower at day's end, each story folds upon itself, ending with the words of its own title as its closing phrase. Yet all this manipulation is pulled off with such grace, with such gentle arranging, it seems as natural and correct as the curls on the head of a two-year old child… each story functions as a numbered piece in a remarkably alive puzzle, one that seems to be pulling itself ever closer apart.

Montreal Gazette
Emotionally precise and intellectually passionate.

Globe and Mail
Everyone in Closer Apart is defined by an essential decency . . . What is remarkable is not the twist of events, but that Reid uses the experience to make her characters truer to their own natures. Typically for the book, the shift in dynamics happens naturally, the only true emotions an unwavering generosity of spirit…

Macleans
Gayla Reid …has launched a compelling first novel, the ambitously named All the Seas of the World. It's the meandering saga of a friendship between two women, Deirdre and Bernadette, who come to age during the Vietnam War. A truly global novel, it touches on several traumatic political events and love affairs on several continents. Reid has a miraculously fluid way of binding together impressions (tearful memories of a lost father with the sensations of a foot massage) in a voice as natural as breathing.

Globe and Mail
Reid’s stories, set in Vietnam, Canada, and her native Australia, and featuring antiwar activists, vets and convent-school girls, won her a well-deserved fistful of prizes in the mid-nineties . . . What’s marvellous is how she’s managed to import successfully these same themes, subject matter, and most importantly, her deliciously lucid writing style into her first novel while creating something entirely new.

Quill & Quire
With All the Seas of the World, award-winning short story writer Gayla Reid makes a confident and compelling, affecting and strong-minded entry into long fiction. And she does it like a champion hurdler, breezing over a multitude of thematic obstacles, any of which could bring a lesser writer to grief.

Vancouver Sun
Gayla Reid's new novel is a wonderfully absorbing, challenging, intelligent book.

Sydney Morning Herald
There is something "extra-territorial" about these stories. One feels they could not have been written by someone solely resident in Australia… or Canada or the United States for that matter.

Vancouver Sun
What Reid tells us is that we are one in the great liquid avenue of life. This sense is so strong in her stories that you could almost believe she swam here from her birth continent and is herself connected to everything that went before her.

Australian Book Review
Reid is a spare, controlled writer who lets perfectly chosen moments, gestures, details, reveal the most intimate and devastating information about people.

Montreal Gazette
To Be There With You arrives with literary bells ringing. It is easy to see why. Reid is already a mature writer, at once highly poetic and visual… Her handling of a classic theme – sex and death in wartime – is superb.

Georgia Straight, Vancouver
Australian-born author Gayla Reid's prose is compact, elegant, perfect. Her work has an emotional toughness and intellectual strength that is not often found in new writers.

Books in Canada
[The title story] "To Be There With You" follows a journalist who becomes involved in a relationship with a married Australian soldier in Vietnam. It's the story's restraint that gives it its power; everything, however inevitable, seems to happen in the silence between words.