One of the greatest modern Russian writers, perhaps the greatest

A writer of fantastic genius

Bulgakov is a wild, mobile, crafty devotee of ideas

Wryly funny and fascinating

Blizzards blow, wolves run loose in the forests, the doctor duels with Death, who is never satisfied

Thoroughly satisfying

Nobody tops Russo for nailing the self-aggrandising sourness of a certain class of American intelligentsia. Hollywood agents should be on standby

Russo's well-scripted story of mid-life crisis breezily captures the moment when everything was predictable and yet somehow you failed to see it coming

Hugely inventive and playful debut

Imaginatively folkloric...the experience of sharing in its feverish tussling with ideas is consistently exuberant

When Rich writes of his characters, their affections, their impulses and failings, he writes generously and movingly...Surprising friendships, small intimacies of fidelity and kindness, large gestures of joy: The Mayor's Tongue does all these so well, pointing the way to Nathaniel Rich's promise as a fiction writer

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