Swift's world-famous satire was an instant bestseller...his vision is dark, often verging on the obscene

It is universally read, from the cabinet council to the nursery

It has entered the iconography of western culture as perhaps no other single novel, giving words to the English language and inspiring remarkably diverse acts of homage... A political comedy, an existentialist meditation, a bleak thriller about an outsider caught between worlds...at the heart of Swift's masterwork is an ennobling sadness, a lament for a world gone mad

Among the six indispensable books in world literature

Everyone standing for political office . . . should have a compulsory examination in Gulliver's Travels

Tess Callahan explores themes of love, loss and the scars life leaves on us in her painfully poignant novel April & Oliver. It is a lovely story. The characters are heart-rendingly believable as the pair struggle to find the seeds of who they once were and where exactly they went off the tracks. It's a tale of first love and the enormous depth of feeling left for someone who knows exactly from where each of your scars comes.

Think of it as a summer read with benefits.

The urgency of Callahan's narrative and its volatile juxtapositions--innocent passion and dark sexuality; duty and desire; first love and ruined love--make it impossible not to care deeply for these characters and their thwarted yearning and their heart-wrenching stories.

Grappling fates are the DNA of suspense, and Tess Callahan braids loss, longing, romance and violence into a tense, gratifying narrative. The characters in APRIL & OLIVER feel inexorable--either destined or doomed to be together. The need to discover which--and how--keeps the reader turning pages.