“Under a disparate set of headings—The Self, Forgiveness, Animals, Touch, Beauty, Masculinity, Loneliness, Kindness, Dysfunction, Doubt, Next, Beginnings—Morton weaves together a wonderfully readable and wide-ranging exploration of the visible and invisible touchstones of our lives. He takes us on an enjoyable and enlightening metaphysical magic carpet ride powered by curiosity... Morton is a national treasure and we need more like him.”

“As someone who reads a lot of books, and takes notes while doing so, it’s often instructive to see what I end up writing. I’ve underlined lots of pages in Rick’s book, but when I sat down to write I realised I wanted to talk more about its impact on me, rather than quote from its pages. That’s my suggestion with this book: read it and find the parts of it that work for you.”

“With this book, Morton invites the reader into his search, and to be part of the resultant healing and understanding of what makes us human. We journey through music and friendships, through memories of the past, through conversations with different generations, and we look forward with hope. Read this investigation because it will remind you of how optimism and love work together. Read it because your heart has been broken somewhere along the line and you need to know how to mend. Read this book because Rick Morton is the bloke we all need in our life to show us it is going to be okay.”

“Morton’s journalism has marked him out as a writer of rare compassion and forensic curiosity, and across his memoirs he’s applied that to questions of his own capacity and incapacity, and his 2019 diagnosis of complex post-traumatic stress disorder. The emotional abuse and absence of his father – so vividly recounted in One Hundred Years of Dirt – could not just be understood as a story of the failings of the past; it was a defining reality of Morton’s adult life and one that required him to explore the nature of love and being loved, and the ways in which he needed to reassess his relationship with the world.”