A master of his discipline rightly hailed as one of the best historical novelists writing today

Scibona is a gutsy, heart-and-soul writer, unafraid of emotion and ready to take risks

It may have taken a while for Scibona to get to this side of the Atlantic, but The End suggests this is the beginning of a fascinating career from an important new American voice

This is an extraordinary novel about the experience of immigration; unsentimental and beautifully written

Its moments of sharply realised emotional pull and gentle beauty reel you in

Its careful plotting and graceful language certainly show it to be a work of exquisite control

Crammed with clever, striking imagery and vivid passages of almost poetic dialogue... it's a work that exerts a hold over the reader, becoming incrasingly gripping as it progresses

Dealing with issues of identity and abandonment, and with an underlying sense of racial menace, this debut is difficult, dark and slyly humorous

By hijacking the realism of the immigrant novel with a metaphysics of his own, Scibona has created a daring, haunting addition to, and extension of, the genre

A masterful novel... Full of wisdom, consequence and grace, Salvatore Scibona's radiant debut brims with the promise of a remarkable literary career, of which The End is only the beginning

Engulfing. Entangled. Fate-laden. Flinty. Dry-eyed. Memento meets Augie March. Didion meets Hitchcock. Serpentine. Alien. American. Ohioan. McCarthyite (Cormac). Bellowed (Saul)

Scibona excels at the creation of character

In his lyrical debut novel, The End, Salvatore Scibona brilliantly captures how this time warp lurks at the center of family life...In aiming to trace elements more than sentimental about relationships, though, Scibona has bravely reached beyond the familiar tricks of the realistic family novel. He has unleashed metaphors and ideas that have their own dark logic

Like no other contemporary writer, Salvatore Scibona is heir to Saul Bellow, Graham Greene and Virginia Woolf, and his masterful novel stands as proof of it - a concordance of the immigrant experience from the beautiful to the brutal and everything in between

There is an intensity of purpose to Salvatore Scibona's endeavour that is decidedly uncommon in a debut novel.... There is no doubt whatsoever of the beauty or brilliance of Scibona's writing

To write a stream-of consciousness story set over one day immediately invites comparisons with James Joyce and Virginia Woolf. It is a mark of how good a writer Scibona is that he survives such comparisons

Scibona's formidable first novel is an evocative portrait of the American immigrant experience...What is most striking is how Scibona captures the sights, sounds and smells of immigrant life at a time when a generation of newcomers was merging into the mainstream.

This ravenous prose offers its share of challenges, but Scibona's portrayal of the lost world of Elephant Park is a literary tour de force