Joyce Carol Oates, The New York Review of Books | Zia Haider Rahman

Joyce Carol Oates, The New York Review of Books

“Remarkable…an adventure story of sorts, echoing not only the canonical Heart of Darkness but F. Scott Fitzgerald’s The Great Gatsby…the novels of dislocation and inquiry of Graham Greene and W.G. Sebald, and…the spy novels of John le Carré…a novel of ideas, a compendium of epiphanies, paradoxes, and riddles…one is moved to think of Thomas Mann’s The Magic Mountain…this powerful debut is a unique work of fiction bearing witness to much that is unspeakable in human relationships as in international relations.”

“Among outstanding novels is the impressive debut of Zia Haider Rahman…The meticulous interweaving of Rahman’s fiction necessitates reading both forward and back, and makes us realize: who cares about ‘page-turners’ when the true pleasure of a work of fiction is its gravitational pull upon us?”

Joyce Carol Oates
The New York Review of Books

Times Literary Supplement
Best Books 2014