RaveThe Financial Times (UK)[An] unlikely love story is the heart of this extraordinary novel ... \'Make it new\' was Ezra Pound’s exhortation, a battle-cry that sounds a little tired these days. And yet Lish, in his detailed, unsparing and yet always sympathetic portrait of the lives under his consideration, does exactly that. How? By subsuming politics — this book certainly falls into the category of the \'post 9/11\' novel — within the brilliantly observed, fully realised particulars of its characters’ everyday existence. And those particulars are both completely individual and yet, somehow, eternal ... This is a novel of clean, spare language, a book that allows you to feel the world it builds by showing you just what that world looks like. Anywhere Lish rests his gaze, he sees precisely: he chooses his scenes and settings with an unerring and original eye. Anywhere Lish rests his gaze, he sees precisely: he chooses his settings with an unerring and original eye. That would be enough to make this a good novel; what makes it a great novel is Lish’s human sensibility ... I was reminded, as I went along, of the way in which novelists such as Dickens and Zola created situations and lives that would, finally, begin to effect social change; it’s possible to think that this book might do something similar ... this novel is nothing less than a triumph, worthy of every heroic adjective a critic could throw. It is a reminder, plain and simple, of what fiction is for.
