What the Family Needed

Somehow the novel feels at once magical and very normal, a wishful fantasy about the strength it can take to love one's family members well. - Entertainment Weekly

What the Family Needed is a wonderful novel: imaginative, intelligent, empathetic. It's like a cross between The Corrections and The Slap, except without any of the gloom or rage and with the addition of something that may or may not be either a form of magic realism or simply that old staple of the literary art, metaphor. - Sydney Morning Herald

Every now and then, a novel arrives that conveys not only wisdom and understanding but also offers a dose of magic. Part fable, part dreamscape, part family drama, What the Family Needed can be read in several ways. Some of the delight is that nothing is lost in choosing one way over another; in fact, each reading contains all other possible readings. - Courier Mail

Amsterdam has a gift for switching reality about: in his sharp and engaging fiction, life seems ordinary but radically unsettling. It's not even clear what species of fiction we are dealing with... Exhilarating. - The Australian

Strange and marvellous territory... With such a ferocious intelligence and playful curiosity at work here, all we can hope for is to hang on for the ride. - The Monthly

There's something fresh and engaging about Steven Amsterdam's writing - a lightness of touch with some of life's more troubling human scenarios sprinkled with a frisson of other worldliness... Like his 2009 debut Things We Didn't See Coming is packed to the brim with fascinating ideas that play on your mind and characters so vivid they seem to leap from the page... It's a magical concept. - The Australian Women's Weekly