An impressive spectrum of meaning and feeling, both abstract and tangible... This one-of-a-kind novel... feels nothing less than vital.

Pure Colour is the apocalypse written as trance, a sleepwalker's song about the end of all things... There is also Heti's lovely prose to enjoy, her beautifully sustained tone, the way she is, as a writer, earnest, funny and sweet... Pure Colour is an original, a book that says something new for our difficult times.

Exemplifies both originality and sharpness... the kind of book that you start reading again as soon as you finish it, to see how on earth the author pulled it off... Descriptions of grief that are so surprising and true they made me gasp.

Pure Colour is not just a novel, it's a creation myth, a fairy tale, a story about making art and living on this planet. A story about death and the irresistible inner stirrings that bring us back to life. Beautiful and impossible to put down. Sheila Heti is a genius.

Wonderfully entertaining... a treat to read. Expect to take in the work of a true wordsmith.

What makes Heti's novels so compelling is... the questions her characters need answering at moments of flux in their lives... [Pure Colour] left me full of admiration and wonder.

An explicitly mystical book... So new...This book, so full of argument, feels weightless.

Just like that, there's magic. Like Iris Murdoch's novels, Heti's are philosophically intense, although Heti's work is pared down where Murdoch's was Rabelaisian. Heti owns a sharp axe. In Pure Colour the wood chips that fall are as interesting as the sculpture that gets made.

Buoyed by a dazzling assortment of questions, curiosities and wild propositions that betray the author's agile and untamed mind...[Pure Colour] brings into view a certain organic and ecstatic wholeness: bright splashes of feeling and folly, of grief and loss...[it] defies classification.

Heti excels at small moments, delicately revealed.

Heti is brilliant at nailing down universal cultural experiences.

A philosophical fable about art, death, faith and the perilous state of the universe.

It isn't often that a novel dares to rethink the order of the universe we live in, yet in Pure Colour, Sheila Heti aims for just that. Making new sense of our cracked world through a vulnerable meditation on love and art that feels both personal and cosmic, this is a book that takes good care of its reader, and heals.

The most timely, urgent book of 2022... It feels both as thrillingly inventive as [Heti's] ever been and also defiantly and satisfyingly middle-aged... Genius.

Pure Colour is unabashedly metaphysical and completely outlandish...Yet neither grief nor theology can suppress Heti's oddball wit and affection for wildly inappropriate sexual metaphors, for which a reader should be grateful... Heti is the rare mystic with a sense of humor.

Sheila Heti has the innate ability to capture feelings and thinkings that can seem so mercurial, and to provoke new avenues of thought on social codes, with challenge, care, and clarity. Her writing is both a relief and an invigoration.

Pure Colour will make you question life and choices in the same philosophical and lyrically written way.

Heti has evolved the leanest, more powerful, playful, and entirely unique form for writing ideas. With one foot in the everyday and another in the floating world, Pure Colour is a pure feat.

Pure Colour...[is] a honed gem, a surreal bildungsroman... With its philosophical meditations, poetic vignettes and absurdist comedy, it is...a bracing reminder that the novel is the literary form where a writer is free to do anything... Heti...[is] an original and influential voice in contemporary fiction

Heti's... writing is beguiling, funny and wise. The novel's surreal elements invite as many interpretations as an abstract painting

Heti's work is always original - that Pure Colour is also deeply moving makes it all the more remarkable

Compelling

A philosophical novel as timely as the fictions of Camus and Hesse were for another generation. Heti's voice, however, is entirely her own: bold, searching, hilarious, simultaneously artful and artless... her grandest...novel yet

Galgut understands the complexities of the human heart which he reveals with the finest delicacy. This is an emotionally powerful and thrilling novel that haunts one long after it has been laid down

A surprising number of novelists are very good; few are extraordinary. Like his compatriot J.M. Coetzee, the South African writer Damon Galgut is of this rare company . . . To praise the novel in its particulars - for its seriousness; for its balance of formal freedom and elegance; for its humor, its precision, its human truth - seems inadequate and partial. Simply: you must read it. Like other remarkable novels, it is uniquely itself, and greater than the sum of its parts. The Promise evokes, when you reach the final page, a profound interior shift that is all but physical. This, as an experience of art, happens only rarely, and is to be prized

I was mesmerised by The Promise, Damon Galgut's novel of the decline and fall of a South African family, told over four decades and four funerals. These are characters dancing on the edge of ruin, living out their lives around a family farm in Pretoria, a place suffused with the threat and consequence of violence. Galgut's prose is intoxicating, managing the rare feat of being utterly liberated and fiercely controlled. A brilliant book

If possible, The Promise packs yet more of a punch than Galgut's previous novels. Fuelled by sex and death, this is a South African Gotterdammerung charting a white family's inexorable decline from significance and power. Its indignation at its morally bankrupt central characters is leavened with languid comedy, as though Galgut had collaborated with Tennessee Williams. The effect is utterly compelling

So acute, indeed, are Mr. Galgut's descriptions - of a character's inner life, a body's fragility, a family's shared wounds, a country's accumulated scars - that they seem like our perceptions, not his . . . Time and again in Mr. Galgut's fiction, South Africa materializes, vast, astonishing, resonant. And on this vastness, he stages intimate dramas that have the force of ancient myth

This tour-de-force unleashes a searing portrait of a damaged family and a troubled country in need of healing

Galgut extends his extraordinary corpus with a rich story of family, history, and grief

Galgut is a terrifically agile and consistently interesting novelist, certain up there with Nadine Gordimer and JM Coetzee as a chronicler of his nation's anguished complexity

[A] magnificent new novel. Galgut sweeps his ruthlessly forensic gaze over each of the protagonists...as well as the country at large

Labelled a masterpiece and one of the best novels of the year within a week of publication... Galgut is on his finest form as he explores grief, despair and love in his inimitable style. Read this book if nothing else this year.

[A] gripping, profound tale... a damning commentary on South Africa's many broken promises

Ingenious... The most distinctive element of the novel, and its greatest pleasure, is the effortless way Galgut flows from mind to mind and body to body, whether male, female, pubertal, menopausal, maturing, ageing or dying. It's almost uncanny

Surrender to the music of Galgut's prose, however, and the rewards are considerable

Excellent... The Promise is a powerful novel of character... [an] ambitious novel but, remarkably, Galgut rarely needs to strain for impact... his ability deftly to shift perspective from one character to the next creates a distinctive polyphonic effect

A convincing and heartfelt novel

Politically chastening and technically superb. It's hard to see any novel beating it

A powerful read

This is the finest of all Damon Galgut's extraordinary novels. It reads as if the author has liberated himself from certain shackles he has needed in the past to convey the feelings of repression and social discomfort his people suffer... The writing - so impish, so playful - is a constant joy

Vivid and suggestive, moving and often very funny

Damon Galgut is the most worthy winner of the Booker prize we've seen for many years... The book trembles in the hand with its political relevance

A sobering allegory, to be sure, but also a giddy pleasure, thanks to Galgut's restlessly acrobatic narrative voice, which darts and zooms unpredictably around the action

One of the world's great writers

A dazzling feat of kaleidoscopic storytelling

I would have chosen this novel before it won the Booker... What makes it special is the humanity with which it is written and Galgut's cinematic prose, which shifts seamlessly from one perspective to the next

The Promise...is a remarkable tale of four generations of one South African family and of the country itself. Like his earlier books, it reveals him as a master of human complexity. No wonder it won the Booker

A complex, clever, wryly observant tale of one family's decline amid a nation's birth

[A] masterful, sweeping novel... a piercing dissection of a country at a decisive historical junction and the intersection of socio-political events and private life

The Promise is just 300 pages long, but Galgut shows his skills as a concise and piercing novelist by packing so much into this exceptional book

A layered, clever and sometimes uncomfortable read, but with a gripping story

A remarkably successful combination of formal discipline and finely observed characterisation, it was a worthy winner of the 2021 Booker prize

The judges of this year's Booker prize rightly crowned this outstanding multigenerational saga... The morally chewy scenario is given extra zest by an acrobatic narrative voice full of trickery

The Promise...is mesmerising

A joyful masterclass in fiction... a dizzying adventure that underlines one of the most appealing things about fiction: it is the closest we can ever get to inhabiting other perspectives

Inventive and full of energy

Gentle, precise, insightful, melancholy but warm