'It is some measure of Fosse's talents that he manages to weave such a compelling narrative from a largely static setting ... Nothing really happens and yet there is something quietly dramatic about Fosse's meandering and rhythmic prose, aided by Damion Searls's limber translation, which has a strangely mesmerising effect. ... [A]n intense reading experience.'
-- Lucy Popescu, Independent

'Prose doesn't have hooks, and Fosse's incantations are as unexcerptable as Philip Glass symphonies or Béla Tarr tracking shots.... On it goes, building layer upon layer of past and present, ancestors and loved ones, until you are immersed in that world and the prose conjures luminous glory flashing past like Blakean angels. Maybe it is convincing to say that Fosse is the only writer whose book has made me weep with emotion as I translated it.'
-- Damion Searls, Paris Review

'Fosse carefully captures the contradictions...It is hard not to marvel at what peace and sorrow he fits into a single thought...'
-- George Berridge, TLS

'The Beckett of the twenty-first century.'
-- Le Monde

'A drowning is solemnly relived over the generations in Fosse's circuitous, claustrophobic tale. ... The immense burden of family history weighs heavily on each generation as ghosts, memories, and tragedies collide to effects both confounding and enlightening.'
-- Publishers Weekly

'It is becoming increasingly difficult to find any Norwegian author who can equal Jon Fosse.'
-- Tom Egil Hverven, NRK

'Jon Fosse is a major European writer.'
-- Karl Ove Knausgaard, author of My Struggle

'Jon Fosse has managed, like few others, to carve out a literary form of his own.'
-- Nordic Council Literary Prize

'Like Faulkner's best works, Aliss at the Fire is about the inescapability of the past and how history reverberates mysteriously across generations. Through voices and narratives that are constantly interrupting and interfering with one another, Fosse captures the grief--and love--that can never be put into words.'
-- Alex Shepherd, The Atlantic