Nobody writes about the American family with more tenderness and honesty

A simple, moving, generous work

The Lord giveth and the Lord taketh away - with words. But the Lord giveth back, miraculously, in the form of this book and this family history

A true story, told with all the powerful authority and cunning narrative order of a major writer

His best work since The Counterlife

An extraordinary book about what it is to know a father

Roth masterfully creates a remarkable portrait of a life that, seen from the outside, does not seem singular or remarkable, but which Roth turns into something deeply emblematic about the last American century… a literary tour-de-force

The humiliations and joys of childhood, magnified by time, are delicately revisited

The elliptical prose style that earned Saramago the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1998 imbues these snapshots with a sense of time irrecoverably lost as the author, who died earlier this year, reprises the significant episodes of his youth. Any lack of drama will be of little consequence to admirers of Saramago, whose mostly rural vignettes reflect the emotional pitch of an illustrious literary career

As fascinating as it is at times utterly disturbing