The fantasising and storytelling deliver a body blow of total irreverence to the solemn mythopoeia of monumental historiography

Hrabal bounces and floats. His mode is a sort of dancing realism, somewhere between fairytale and satire.He is a most sophisticated novelist, with a gusting humour and a hushed tenderness of detail. We should read him

Well worth reading

A master of rueful comedy and tender eroticism, Hrabal was, for all his eccentricity, a major figure in 20th-century world literature.

Ambitious and difficult with multi-layered prose that will work its way into your very soul

A genre-smashing novel

It grips the reader from the outset, and as it is read, layer upon layer of psychological and intertextual meaning can be unpicked and analyzed. It is certainly an immensely powerful contribution to both fairy-tale and fantasy genres

Brave and bold

This is an astonishing and beautifully written novel with very strong cross-over appeal

To condemn it as merely wilful taboo-breaking is to miss the humanity in what is one of the strangest and most moving works of children's literature I have read in years . . . Look beyond the shocking scenes and this is a novel that explores the most profound human emotions with a clear gaze; it made me weep like a child at the end

Enthralling, at times unsettling but always richly imagined

This is a multi-layered novel which requires and deserves attentive reading, regardless of the reader's age; it is unlikely, though, to have much appeal for the censorious adult or for anyone under 16

Edric succeeds in painting an atmospheric dystopia that is at once unsettling and frightening and laudable for its skilful evocation of the doom and the despair