Stories as keen and bright as a scalpel... Courage shines from every angle of this profoundly human collection by the greatest of modern Russian writers

A marvellous writer

The oil lamps of his little provincial hospital seemed to him a lonely beacon which symbolised the battle between light and darkness... These straighforward yet extraordinary sketches gain their strength from also being the account of a young man's growth. One begins to see that he became a novelist not because he had material but because he was storing up passion and temperament

Wryly funny and fascinating

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

Intensely cinematic

Deft exploration of the wondrous and sad inscrutability of the human heart.

Yan is a keen observer of the cruel and the magical, and has a fine sense of the permeable line between high hilarity and Kafkan nightmare.

Masterful

Masterful novel… Spare, beautifully understated prose…

Blurs fact and fiction with aplomb… Royle’s novel is a sharp portrait of a man going very wrong.

Extremely good.

Dazzling… Royle attended last year’s Man Booker Prize ceremony as editor of one of the shortlisted titles, Alison Moore’s The Lighthouse… I wouldn’t bet against Royle having to dry-clean the tux on his own account next time.

Royle’s coup is to deliver the pithy sting of a good short story many times over the course of a whole novel.

I admired it so much and wanted to go back and see how it was all put together. His book absolutely enchanted me.

This may be a tricksily metafictional novel but Royle hasn’t forgotten his readers.

5 stars, gripping, innovative and fluent.

Nicholas Royle has produced the holy grail: a literary page-turner. Although it’s published in January, I’ll be astonished if it doesn’t make the short list of many a prize at the end of the year.

A strange, unsettling brew that simply entertains at first before revealing darker and more dangerous depths as it progresses; a dark and delicious treat for lovers of literary fiction who like to have their grey cells tickled.

A vertiginous murder mystery with echoes of JG Ballard, David Lodge and Alain Robbe-Grillet

If writing about creative writing is to risk a novel eating itself, we can be thankful that a writer of Royle's skills put himself in charge of the banquet

A brilliant, eerie mix of campus meta-novel, whodunnit, failed-love story and existential contemplation

This just might be the exceptional book which should be judged by its cover

An ingenious tale

Cleverly metafictional, humorously perverse, and impressively original