The wit, depth and wickedness of this resonant novel suggest a happy synthesis of Dickens, Malcolm Lowry and Philip Roth... This is a very fine work

A rich, rude, eccentric saga about the Gursky dynasty that crossbreeds Jewish and Canadian myths and is full of splendid comic detail

Vast, chaotic, vigorously imagined and ambitiously freighted

A major work of rich complexity

It is passionate, it has a thickness of living about it, and it is made to blaze every now and then with an uncommonly fine bit of worldly wisdom, memorably delivered out of the side of the mouth