Beautifully written . . . an inspiring read

A spiritual journey of self-discovery

Solstad is expert in delineating the absurdities of existence… Solstad exposes us to ourselves.

He’s a kind of surrealistic writer... I think that’s serious literature.

His language sparkles with its new old-fashioned elegance.

He doesn’t write to please other people... Do exactly what you want, that’s my idea… the drama exists in his voice, in his comments and views, and that works, it helps connect the reader to the story.

Solstad's novels are full of dryly comic, densely existential despair . . . reminiscent of Witold Gombrowicz, with his keen sense of the absurd. Both translators Tiina Nunnally and Steven T. Murray have rendered Solstad's rhythms into wonderfully idiosyncratic English.

[Solstad] is a wonderful stylist whose prose gives the impression of not being stylised at all… The prose is distracted and persistent, compelling and compelled.

Before Knausgaard, Norway had Solstad, whose pitiless, mesmeric, darkly comic stories of quiet desperation – here it’s a failed librarian – turn banality to sublimity.

An idiosyncratic, at times impish writer, whose voice – insinuating yet direct, droll but aghast – is impossible to ‘unhear’ once you’ve encountered it.

In Norway, Solstad is as celebrated as, say, Don DeLillo or Toni Morrison [in the US]... An utterly hypnotic and utterly humane writer.

Without question Norway's bravest, most intelligent novelist.

Solstad is a writer of depth.

Since he published his first book of stories in 1965, Dag Solstad has been to Scandinavian literature what Philip Roth has been to American letters or Günter Grass to German writing: an unavoidable voice.

Solstad’s unusual, entertaining novel of restrained humor follows its protagonist, T Singer, over a lifetime of nonengagement... [it] brilliantly shows the humor and pain of obsessiveness, and the anxious, analytic Singer emerges as an enduring creation.

Seriously good... a beautiful read you won't forget

Haddon’s glittering tapestry of a novel skilfully redeploys the structures of Pericles’ source material… In The Porpoise, Haddon gives voice to a character who, in Shakespeare, receives no more than a passing mention, and in doing so, shows the transcendent power of stories to heal and restore

Staggeringly ambitious, innovative, beautifully written... The Porpoise has the pace of a really good thriller, but combined with a subtlety and depth that few thrillers possess

A full-throttle blast of storytelling mastery. I read it on the plane in a single sitting at 30,000 feet and enjoyed every second. Gorgeously written and very clever, but also such fun! Ancient and modern overlap and tangle in exhilarating ways, it’s like romping through a Literary Netflix: an episode of something historical and bloody, then something slick and contemporary, then something really weird and unnerving. So many pleasures in one book. The Porpoise is a joy to read

There is storytelling of such primacy in Mark Haddon’s The Porpoise, that when I turned the last page, I was left completely elated. A gorgeous, enlivening experience. It is also one that insistently asks: how? How did all this add up to something so sublime? How, with all its subtle slips, and stunningly weird passages, could this strange, beautiful book feel so finely composed? It is disarmingly wild. And the story itself, in which the myth of Appolonius, remixed as Pericles by Shakespeare and George Wilkins, is again turned inside out, thrown backward and forward, and hurled against oceans (in an act of imaginative heroism by the author), invites us to understand something Haddon always has, which is that even stories as old as this one can remain relevant to our current moment. Especially if they are told with this much originality and conviction

Mark Haddon cuts right down to the grittiness of humanity every time he writes. The Porpoise is a beautiful, unputdownable, ancient tangle with its own sweeping tides and dangerous depths

It's hard to describe just how much tremendous joy and pleasure there is on every page

Haddon deftly adapts this ancient myth for the 21st century to illuminate a timeless, ugly truth about how the violent appetites of men strip women of their agency

Beguiling yet unsettling

A fantastical narrative that involves rampaging pirates, ghost women and princesses...Bold

This gripping and evocative novel questions the nature of the stories we tell ourselves and others

A rollicking fantastical narrative

A wild adventure...full of splendid incident... There is much to enjoy in this novel -- the liveliness of Haddon's imagination and the virtuosity of his style

[The Porpoise] achieve[s] the truly Shakespearean feat of simultaneously conveying disgust at the darkest aspects of human behaviour and relishing them, making the reader feel horribly – and deliciously – complicit

Stamped with the same bold and original imagination… Haddon’s mash-up of myth and history may have a fantastical feel, but once the reader has adjusted to his exuberant originality they will find prose on every page that is pure joy

Haddon writes with wrenching beauty about how the world inflicts itself on the disadvantaged... It's a testament to Haddon's prodigious gifts as a storyteller that this strange, epic adventure is so compulsively readable

A strange, tangled web of a story, drawing on ancient mythology and expanding into time travel… this innovative novel offers escapes into multiple worlds

Irresistible storytelling that slides between the present day and a mythic realm… A heady delight

The novel draws on Shakespeare and Greek legend, and is the sort of mile-a-minute adventure you can get lost in for hours without realising

[The Porpoise] confirms the sense of a gifted writer letting his talent off the leash at last… Mind-bending yet marvellously readable, it stakes Haddon’s claim to be one of the best writers in Britain right now

Haddon conveys all this with startling granularity: the stinking, seething Jacobean London traversed by the ghosts of Wilkins and Shakespeare… Haddon's novel creates, throughout, a looming sense that something very bad but not quite perceptible is in the process of unfolding: a terrible half-glimpsed fate that the characters are powerless to resist

The Porpoise begins as a page-turning thriller and soon shifts into something slippery and strange – but remains propulsive throughout

Mark Haddon’s best novel yet. The Porpoise begins as a propulsive thriller…and segues into a classical-world adventure that reinvents the story of Pericles in prose of a hallucinatory vividness

The Porpoise reworks legend with the compelling force of a thriller

[An] exquisite retelling of Shakespeare’s Pericles

Thrilling, dramatic and exquisitely written, The Porpoise combines myth and reality to enthralling effect