A dark comedy about the vanity of human desires which deftly balances compassion and cynicism

Bizarrely funny and beautifully crafted

Undeniably compelling

A brilliantly inventive writer...He understands the nature of storytelling and is at once terribly moving and wildly funny

Seven Houses in France is an enjoyable, somewhat frightening novel by one of Europe's best novelists... Atxaga is still the master of a complex story, told with deceptive simplicity

Atxaga’s grim and complicated story is lucidly told

Sharp

Atxaga’s story is fresh and his treatment of violence psychologically rich

It takes a special kind of genius to transform this most unpromising of locations into a vehicle for black comedy, but that is precisely what the Basque author Bernardo Atxaga achieves in this mesmerizing novel

A penetrating combination of Hitchcock's Rear Window, Camus' existential ennui and Larkin's social embarrassment

At times dark and moving, even on occasion, unexpectedly funny...It is visceral in its investigations into the derailing of one mans life in all its sticky, existential glory.The book’s icy prose and long sentences – which in the wrong hands would feel heavy and laboured – flow with a quickness that hints at the workings of Andersen’s mind, and Solstad has a way of producing at the protagonists bourgeois anxieties desperately sorry for him

Solstad, Norway’s most distinguished living writer, is a clear-eyed moralist who takes an existentialist’s interest in the compromises, evasions and accommodations we make to get though life. Wryly humorous and needle-sharp in skewering pretension, Solstad is unlike anyone currently writing in English

Forget the Scandi crime production line and turn to this sly thriller

A wry moral tale exploring the little evasions and compromises of everyday life. Translator Agnes Scott does justice to Solstad’s measured voice

This short-but-striking novel quickly reveals itself to be…crime fiction, yes, but also a subtle and deeply introspective consideration of the inertia of lonely middle-age, its philosophy existentialist in the manner of Jean Paul Sartre, Ingmar Bergman and certain novels of Georges Simenon. The result is a highly complex and accomplished work

Intriguing tale… Solstad expertly navigates the bizarre mind of a clever but lonely man locked in an existentialist nightmare

This is no straightforward crime novel…an exploration of guilt, inaction and moral quandaries