RaveThe New York Times Book Review...beautifully spare and poignant ... This is a novel that charms not through the complexities of its plot but through its subtle revelations of character and the human condition ... The gift of O’Nan’s fiction is to immerse us deeply in Henry’s essence, in his desire to be useful and his nostalgia for a vanished way of life, for the forgotten homespun rituals and for houses with slate roofs and ornate gables. And when we watch him winding the clocks forward, we find ourselves wishing he could hold the minute hand motionless for just a while longer.
Richard Bausch
RaveThe New York Times Book ReviewSometimes the action is galvanic, an explosive moment that puts the reader in mind of Flannery O’Connor’s ability to open out a story into dangerous, unknown territory. And, like O’Connor, Bausch is able to pull a story back from melodrama, no matter how sudden or dramatic the turn of events ... Bausch routinely takes us out to the end of the narrative pier and asks us to jump. Infidelity, as a literary theme, interests me less at face value than just about anything I can think of. But in three of these stories, Bausch uses it to excavate a surprising sense of drama and revelation ... After nearly 40 years of his distinctive, sometimes electrifying fiction, it’s fair to say that Bausch has stayed open for business through all kinds of circumstances and conditions, that he’s been able to keep the lights on and burning bright.
Stefan Hertmans, Trans. by David Mckay
RaveThe New York Times Book Review\"War and Turpentine affords the sensory pleasures of a good novel while also conveying the restlessness of memoir through its probing, uncertain narrator ... a masterly book about memory, art, love and war ... In a world of novels with overdetermined, linear plotlines — their chapters like so many boxcars on a freight train — War and Turpentine delivers a blast of narrative fresh air.\
