"A psychological hand grenade."--The Atlantic

"A meditative and startlingly clear-eyed first novel."--Newsweek

"Magnificent . . . a remarkably resonant feat of prose."--Seattle Times

"A precise and poetic meditation on love, race, identity, friendship, memory, [and] dislocation."--The Economist

"[Teju] Cole writes beautifully; his protagonist is unique; and his novel, utterly thrilling."--The Globe and Mail

"Lean and mean and bristles with intelligence. The multi-culti characters and streets of New York are sharply observed and feel just right. . . . Toward the end, there's a poignant, unexpected scene in a tailor's shop that's an absolute knockout."--Salon

"I couldn't stop reading Teju Cole's debut novel and was blown away by his ability to capture the human psyche with such beautiful yet subtle prose."--Slate

"An indelible debut novel . . . [It] does precisely what literature should do: it brings together thoughts and beliefs, and blurs borders. . . . A compassionate and masterly work."--The New York Times Book Review

"The cool, concise prose of Open City draws you in more quietly, then breaks your heart. Who knew that taking a long walk in Manhattan could be so profound?"--New York

"Beautiful, subtle, and finally, original . . . Cole has made his novel as close to a diary as a novel can get, with room for reflection, autobiography, stasis, and repetition. This is extremely difficult, and many accomplished novelists would botch it, since a sure hand is needed to make the writer's careful stitching look like a thread merely being followed for its own sake. Mysteriously, wonderfully, Cole does not botch it."--The New Yorker

"In Cole's intelligent, finely observed portrait, Julius drifts through cities on three continents, repeatedly drawn into conversation with solitary souls like him: people struggling with the emotional rift of having multiple homelands but no home." --GQ

"[A] complicated portrait of a narrator whose silences speak as loudly as his words--all articulated in an effortlessly elegant prose . . . Teju Cole has achieved, in this book, a rare balance. He captures life's urgent banality, and he captures, too, the ways in which the greater subjects . . . glimmer darkly in the interstices."--The New York Review of Books

"Open City is not a loud novel, nor a thriller, nor a nail-biter. What it is is a gorgeous, crystalline, and cumulative investigation of memory, identity, and erasure. It gathers its power inexorably, page by page, and ultimately reveals itself as nothing less than a searing tour de force. Teju Cole might just be a W. G. Sebald for the twenty-first century."--Anthony Doerr, Pulitzer Prize-winning author of All the Light We Cannot See