With its matter-of-fact approach to depicting antisemitic violence, its three guileless main characters and its artful folding-together of fable, history and Jewish joke-making, this is a story for the moment and for the ages ... Despite the novel’s fable-like textures, Wilkinson places it firmly in a historical time and place.
Lublin is a mini masterpiece: simple, straightforward, narratologically complex, funny, sad and profoundly satisfying ... A technical tour de force, displaying what a narratologist might describe as a dazzling array of analeptic, proleptic and extradiegetic devices, or what the rest of us might simply regard as highly entertaining and effective zooms, swoops, flashbacks, flashes forward and asides.
[Elya's] dark jokes provide some of the novel’s most powerful moments ... Just as effective are the moments when the narrative jumps into the future to reveal villagers’ ultimate fates in a world moving fast toward the Holocaust.
