"The joke, and the entire seriousness of this brilliant novel, lies in the way Brett has turned the anguish of generations into art... [and] has created an unusually lovely woman [Ester Zepler, the protagonist], full of laughter, torn with anxiety, capable of malice and brimming with love." Her fifth and most celebrated novel, Too Many Men, was published in 2001. Publishers Weekly staff writer felt that "The hardest effect to bring off in fiction is a vision that is at once tender, deeply comic and yet aware of the ultimate sadness of life, the lachrymae rerum. Brett has succeeded triumphantly." Her next novel, You Gotta Have Balls (2005), is the third to feature Ruth Rothwax and her father Edek. Helen Greenwood of The Sydney Morning Herald finds that "Brett herself travels a brave road to joy, instead of the tracks of despair, which is not an easy path for a born worrier. To do so, she sidelines one of the major characters in her work, the Holocaust, and the book is the less for it.". This book has seen significant success, especially in Europe, and has been translated into many languages and been made into a major theatre production in Germany and is touring Europe. The stage adaptation of You Gotta Have Balls, titled Chuzpe in German, starring Otto Schenk, opened at the Kammerspiele Theatre in Vienna in November 2012, was later staged at the Münchner Kammerspiele (2014) and played at the Theater am Kurfürstendamm in 2016. Lola Bensky (2013), Brett's seventh novel was short-listed for the Miles Franklin Literary Award and it received the 2014 Prix Medicis étranger prize in France. Brett has published ten volumes of poetry, four collections of essays, and seven novels. She has also contributed writings to a wide range of newspaper and literary publications, including many columns and articles in Die Zeit, The Australian, Die Welt, Libération, Sydney Morning Herald, The Age, Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung. A portrait of Lily Brett hangs in the National Portrait Gallery. Fiction "Luba" (short story, 28 December 1988) Things Could Be Worse (1990) What God Wants (1992) Just Like That (1994) Collected Stories (1999) Too Many Men (2001) You Gotta Have Balls (2005) Lola Bensky (2013) Non-fiction In Full View (1997) Macmillan Australia New York (2001) Picador Australia Between Mexico and Poland (2002) Picador Australia Only in New York (2014) Suhrkamp Only the others are old (2020) Suhrkamp Old