Sophie McManus, whose writing reminds me of Anne Tyler or Jonathan Franzen ... shows us the world through the cloudy lens of the truly moneyed, and gives us a riveting sense that something horrible is about to happen to these people. She corrals our prurience beautifully.

McManus renders her opulent protagonists sympathetic by investigating their family ‘values’ with wit and generosity

A very sharp novel

McManus, with her intricate re-creation of CeCe’s regal life, hearkens to an earlier artist far less frequently invoked: Edith Wharton . . . some of the funniest writing I’ve read in years: Martin Amis funny; wheezing, choke-on-your-laughter funny. After reading so many comic novels that eventually shatter in brittle cynicism or evaporate in gassy sentimentality, I moved through The Unfortunates with a slowly accruing sense of awe as these characters grew simultaneously more outrageous and more sympathetic.

A truly dexterous writer, one who eyes the insular world she has chosen to crack open for us with as much wisdom as wit…formidable gifts for social satire

Reads as a cross between Tom Wolfe and Brett Easton Ellis at their respective peaks

The Unfortunates is both a mirror on the income inequality of the current moment and a social novel in the old, grand, plotty mode: voracious for detail and punctuated by gasp-inducing turns of fate. Its subjects are money and the people unfortunate enough to have it. Who knew the rich deserved so much to be pitied?

What is truly rich about this stunning debut novel, beyond the over privileged social class in question, is the brilliant language—lucid, quick, accessible, yet almost cubist in its syntactical swerves and surprising word choices—with which Sophie McManus invests the inner lives of the Somners, mother, son, and daughter-in-law – three unforgettable protagonists.

In finely etched detail as sharp as shards of glass, McManus reveals the corrupting power of wealth and the myriad ways it infects individual lives, and families.As relevant as it is compulsively readable.

Is there anything Sophie McManus can’t do? The virtuosity in these pages is astonishing, but just as astonishing is this novel’s abiding heart.

Sophie McManus has a shrewd eye for telling gestures and an ear for cruel speech and kindness.She is an incisive, surprising prose stylist, and her debut novel, The Unfortunates, heralds an exciting new talent with an old soul.

Is Sophie McManus the next Emma Straub?

Cohen, a key member of the United States' under-40 writers' club (along with Nell Freudenberger and Jonathan Safran Foer), is a rare talent who makes highbrow writing fun and accessible

[Cohen has] manifold talents at digging under and around absurdity... Language - not elision - is the primary material of Cohen's oeuvre, and his method of negotiating his way toward meaning is like powering straight through a thick wall of words... The reward is an off-kilter precision, one that feels both untainted and unique

Like [David Foster] Wallace, Cohen is clearly concerned wtih the depersonalizing effects of technology, broken people doing depraved things, and how the two intersect in tragic (and, sometimes, hilarious) ways. The franticness with which he writes about these themes is, at times, Wallace-esque

What dazzles here is a Pynchonesque verbal dexterity, the sonic effect of exotic vocabulary, terraced sentences robust pusn and metaphors and edgy, Tarantino-like dialogue

In Mr. Cohen’s hands, a meme is a matter of life and death, because he goes from the reality we all know—the link, the click—to the one we tend to forget: the human. . . . Cohen is ambitious. He is mapping terra incognita

Enthralling… Awe-inspiring

Cohen is immensely clever, witty, and indeed funny. He also knows about technology, and thus his novel deals with the world in the age of the internet

Book of Numbers brilliantly and rigorously examines a question that confronts literature today: What does the explosion of information from the internet mean for the future of storytelling?

Fascinating...for chutzpah alone, Cohen's chaotic fantasia certainly impresses

Frequently amazing, [it is] the first work of fiction to engage fully with the internet and its influence on modern living

There are wonderful things here cloaked with an invisibility spell, tucked away in the middle of the book, where only the stubbornest seeker after enchantment will find them