I read The Mayor's Tongue with ever-increasing delight, rooting with all my heart for the young protagonist on his near-mythic quest. This is an elegantly-structured, brilliantly-told novel, by turns terrifying, touching, and wildly funny, and always generous and magical... a brave book, a novel brimming with brio.

Playfully postmodern but eminently readable. This is a novel with a big brain and a cheeky wink by an author who could well become one of the defining writers of his generation

The Mayor's Tongue reminds me of Peter Carey's early work- the highest possible praise. It presents a young writer of deep ambition and imagination working with a kind of unnerving maturity.

Ambitious, intelligent, hallucinatory, and, most importantly: heartfelt. Here is a young writer who is not afraid to give literature a kick in the pants

Rich invites absolute trust in his postmodern jousting with the reality-busting potential of storytelling

The book is original and wildly ambitious... his (Rich) inventiveness is joyous

If ambition alone wins prizes, Nathaniel Rich's mantelpiece should be creaking by the end of the year

Rich's novel reads a little like a hybrid of The New York Trilogy and Up the Faraway Tree, with frequent appearances of wood sprites and other forest-dwelling creatures. The fantasy element develops throughout and Rich is at his most successful in the throes of it, building towards his mad denouement. Like with many debuts, there is a little too much going on, but it is original and intelligent, and Rich is an elegant writer with a great deal of promise. He is definitely one to watch

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