Those familiar with McCaffrey and Scarborough's first SF trilogy about life on the sentient planet Petaybee will best appreciate this solid start of a new series, which picks up where Power Play (1995) left off...Fast-paced adventure

Exciting and generously laced with humor...the characters and their interactions are so well realized as to utterly charm readers. Furthermore, to the Celtic and Inuit lore that informed the first trilogy, McCaffrey and Scarborough now add elements of the mythology and lore of Earth's South Sea Islanders

A roaring rollercoaster of a read . . . it'll take your breath away

A furious, ironic, idiosyncratic, unexpurgated torrent, capturing Italian modernity

Sorrentino uses this novel to deal with Italy's unstoppable descent into today's dazed, corrupted and tragically foolish reality...[in] exceptionally adventurous language

Remarkable... It's hard to forget Tony...his image sticks in the reader's mind...he is a true hero of our times

Make sure this novel is in your beach bag this summer

One thinks of...The Tin Drum... A bracing alternative to the staleness of formula, whether on a downscale Italian tour, wandering a Brazilian shantytown, or sinking into a Manhattan mashup of showbiz and sleaze

Beautiful prose...this is a challenging, thoughtful read, even for the die-hard heathen

Beard writes with sharp clarity; short unadorned sentences that contain an unforced, incisive wit....Lazarus's legend continues to fascinate in this totally original book

A fascinating mixture of fiction and academic essay...using biblical sources and other, less orthodox ones, Beard weaves a compelling tale portrait of first-century Israel, of Jerusalem with its factions and sects, and of Jesus, Lazarus's enigmatic friend, as he makes his journey towards the Cross

I finished the book at a sitting. What makes it so gripping is Beard's limitless curiosity.

The approach is unusual, the narrative bold and exhilarating...this book with its melding of fiction and non-fiction, critical analysis and detective work, consolidation and controversy, is a potent combination that breathes life not only into the 'imaginative representations' of historical events but also into the possibilities of what we think a novel might be able to achieve.

So good it's almost off the scale for me. Brave, brilliant and utterly readable.