"Wonderfully witty and compulsively readable. . . . Often laugh-out-loud funny-but Coe has also fashioned a movingly human novel. . . .It's the best novel to date from this talented author." -San Francisco Chronicle
"Jonathan Coe may be the most exciting novelist you've never heard of. . . . Coe has every tool a writer can possess, as though he were a super-novelist assembled from the best parts of others." -People
"With a nineteenth-century novelist's discursiveness and reach, Coe gives us a meditation on the consequences of terrorism, an examination of the post-9/11 political zeitgeist, a satire of everything from book reviewers to modern parenting." -The Atlantic Monthly
"One of the glories of Coe's writing is a magically buoyant narrative technique that makes you feel as though you have been fostering a comfortable intimacy with all his characters since they, and you, were young." -The Daily Telegraph (London)
"Immensely satisfying. . . . Coe is a witty writer with a talent for social satire that singes characters without burning away their humanity." -The Washington Post Book World