"Andrew Key's exquisitely perceptive novel is both a psychological study and a fable. At its centre is a mind at work on thoughts whose cycling it can't - or won't - arrest. It's the mind of Jean-Jacques Rousseau, churning worry, courage, and yearning through mostly gloomy or even inhospitable weather, though sun and joy break through from time to time. Late in his life and longing for peace and freedom, Rousseau is offered refuge in rural England, and there he finds himself the troubled captive of his own thinking. Hoping to inspire people to offer 'the full honest revelation of their complete natural self', he seeks to do so himself. In the process, he reveals himself to be grand, pathetic, brilliant, clueless, and heroic. And Key is discovered to be one of the great young writers of the twenty-first century, a compassionate as well as adventurous thinker."

- LYN HEJINIAN, author of My Life and Positions of the Sun