A lean, quietly elegiac postscript to the protaganist's existence... told in simple, restrained prose, this is a novel brimming with humanity - one to savour

Written with admirable restraint and composed with sturdy, elegant prose, it's an object lesson in the fact that, sometimes, less can be more. Human and moving

A quarter of a century in the making, Peter Pouncey's first novel is laden with the fruits of a lifetime's reflection... The detail reveals Pouncey as a brilliant miniaturist

An intense, memorable little book

Poignant...profound and moving. The work of a superior intelligence

Uplifting yet unbearably sad

Pouncey has a real gift for telling war stories...a meditation on nature and old age

Spare and elegant prose

Mr Pouncey writes with enough style and elegance to bring envy into the heart of many a good novelist

In its reach, intelligence and power it recalls de Lampedusa's The Leopard and Marai's Embers

A wonderful novel of a man's experience- touches every chord... The book is charged with the excitement of intelligent existence... and distinguished, above all, by its great humanity

The Mayor's Tongue is a spare masterpiece of postmodernism, an incisive fable whose myriad threads of plot and thought take the inhibitions of our era to task and make Rich's first novel a New York Trilogy for the new millennium

The sheer inventiveness is hard to resist

Intriguing debut

There's plenty here to pull you in and, it must be said, I do really like the cover

Stories, generations and nationalities collide in what is an entertaining and superior novel