Part of the experience of reading Vann (over time across his oeuvre, and within individual books) is a kind of uneasy curiosity about just how dark he’s going to get and where he’s going to go to find that darkness. This new excursion is as harrowing as anything he has written, as thrillingly desolate, in its way, as the traumatic hallucinations in Legend of a Suicide…One of the most intense and detailed examinations of an act of violence I have ever read in a work of fiction. Its unflinching realism eventually becomes a kind of nightmare surrealism. It is at once deeply disturbing and powerfully propulsive, a hallucinatory insight into what it means, and how it feels, to kill. The book is a vision of hell focused not on the supernatural, but on nature itself. Vann is a writer who hunts big game. He tracks the same wild territory as Joseph Conrad and Cormac McCarthy – the violence and perversity at the root of what we call human nature, the animal savagery that is our first inheritance…For all its unyielding darkness, Goat Mountain is, perhaps perversely, an exhilarating experience. It is, first of all, cathartic in the way of all good tragedies. But it is also exhilarating for the least perverse of reasons: the experience of reading a novelist of David Vann's rare artistry and vision.

The Cain imagery is powerful and the narrator’s psyche fascinating...Vann’s prose never lags. The novel is not just gripping: it tightens around its reader like a boa constrictor...Goat Mountain is a brilliant and wise interrogation of a world in which “We were always killing something, and it seemed we were put here to kill”.

Vann is a daring writer, as bold in his plot development as he is unflinching in his prose...Goat Mountain is a compelling and morally challenging novel by one of America’s most powerful writers.

Vann evokes the scrub, ridges and conifers of northern California with the meticulous eye of a great landscape artist...This story has genuine potency.

This is Vann’s fourth novel, and in that short time he’s mapped out a unique fictional territory, a rugged, literary landscape with debts to Cormac McCarthy and Ernest Hemingway but with an acuteness of eye that’s all the author’s own...Vann’s description of place and action is unsurpassed, a wonderful clarity to his prose, and the voice of his narrator is truly frightening as he tries to come to terms with what’s happened. The tension builds to an extraordinary and explosive climax among the heavily forested mountains, where everything that makes us who we are is called into question. Powerful and deep stuff.

The book has the quality of a ballad or a folk tale…Mr Vann’s work is death-haunted…[He] is so adept, in Goat Mountain, at conjuring a world where rationality has no place…This story has the power of a bullet fired from a gun.

[A] powerful tale of the complicated fragility of family ties…Internationally acclaimed and bestselling author David Vann convincingly conjures up the primeval atmosphere of the wilderness and the depth of the hunting instinct. The spirit of the Old Testament is never very far from his prose, and the story of Cain and Abel hovers over the boy’s sense of right and wrong. Tense and unsettling stuff, difficult to put down and disturbingly memorable.

This is a coming of age story as old as Goat Mountain itself and Vann’s descriptions of the Northern Californian landscape are beautiful and meticulously drawn... Vann’s prose has real pace and momentum and drama so intense that this reader often gasped out loud at the horror presented... This is a triumph of a novel. Please read it.

Vann’s writing is highly descriptive…a gripping read

The author has constructed a wide beautiful splendid vista tainted by a stream of flowing hot red blood with great sentences with a visceral and fluid prose ... David Vann has a prose and voice that the reader may know of, this novel comes to finalise in his dealings with death, loss, and sacrifice, this story marks a great point in his writing’s timeline. One cannot help but feel excited and expectantly wait upon his next novel, on what road he shall traverse and what characters he shall craft with great skill.

Vann’s writing is thoughtful and profound.

There's no doubt that this is a deeply disturbing and violent book — there's one particular scene involving a wounded buck that is stomach-churning — but this is a powerful read that deals with important subjects, not least at what point should a child take responsibility for his actions. It ruminates on the sanctity of life, the sins of the father, the rules (or ethics) of hunting, human guilt and remorse, crime and punishment….[It will] appeal to those who like dark suspenseful tales about moral culpability.

It’s an extraordinary achievement and a riveting work of prose

Illuminated by a clear and insightful knowledge of what it means to be human... Petterson is really a masterful depictor of contemporary life

I Refuse is, despite its apparent realism, a nearly magical literary experience... It simply does not get much better than this

Petterson confirms his reputation as Scandinavia's leading realist writer...the heart-rending contrast between power and powerlessness, silence and speech is anchored in every word in these pages. And in the reader’s soul

A masterpiece...at least as good as Out Stealing Horses... Intimate, shocking, demanding, raw

Norwegian literature's clearest shining star...a masterful novel about friendship, violence and destruction

A moving, complex short novel that is richer and more satisfying than most books several times its length

The suspense isn’t in the plot but the prose, with its extraordinary looping sentences

A harrowing account of childhood, of friendship, and of family disruption… Precise, scrupulous and emotionally intense… Peterson is a skilled storyteller… An admirable and honest novel.

With an enchanting, poetic language Rachel Joyce writes about the fundamental questions of life and death.

Like Harold Fry, Queenie is delightful and dark. Death, duty and regret shadow nearly every page, but the darkness is not unrelenting; there is humor, and there is light.

This lovely book is full of joy. Much more than the story of a woman’s enduring love for an ordinary, flawed man, it’s an ode to messy, imperfect, glorious, unsung humanity ... Her love song is for us. Thank you, Rachel Joyce.

[A] deeply affecting novel…Culminating in a shattering revelation, her tale is funny, sad, hopeful: She’s bound for death, but full of life.

A moving, lyrical read about life, love and saying goodbye. this is a companion story to the similarly entrancing The Unlikely Pilgrimage of Harold Fry, but could be read alone.