"An intricately reflective, simply beautiful book." --Los Angeles Times

"Only a virtuoso could manage such a narrative, and Baxter is and does." --The Washington Post Book World

"A book one reads with pleasure from the first word to the last for the delicacy and truth of its perceptions." --J. M. Coetzee

"[Baxter's] prose is like filtered late-summer light dancing through leaves not quite turned yet--a light bathed with sadness, humor, and a clear, intelligent intensity." --USA Today

"First Light is a novel that moves backward in time, traveling from past to present as though through a tunnel of memory. . . . Like Chekhov, [Baxter] is both tough-minded and compassionate, and he never makes his characters more or less than what they are. They are human, and that in itself is a rare achievement for a writer, a thing to be celebrated above and beyond all other achievements in this splendid book." --Paul Auster

"Here is a voice worth listening to, a voice that has shown itself, in this wonderful, magical novel, to command the music of the spheres." --San Jose Mercury News

"Without question, Charles Baxter is among our best contemporary writers--always graceful, always dramatic. Superlatives are insufficient. Here is literature. Here is art." --Tim O'Brien

"Charles Baxter asks the most wonderful questions and addresses the most essential subjects--the things we have been thinking but haven't . . . known how to begin to say." --Francine Prose

"It's exceedingly rare to come across writing as seamless and engrossing as Charles Baxter's." --The Plain Dealer

"Light and dark, the motifs of Baxter's haunting and human fiction touch the reader in evocative ways." --The Boston Globe

"Baxter's passionate writing raises the level of regard for life itself, let alone the art of writing." --Howard Norman

"Moves over everyday details with the inexorable, contrary tug of memory." --Time

"First Light illuminates the way out of the abyss and into the miracles and wonders that comprise life." --Minneapolis Star-Tribune

"First Light is a daredevil technical feat, and very much more besides that. Charles Baxter's long-term admirers will find that it satisfies their highest hopes." --Madison Smartt Bell