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'This is an important and profoundly felt book about displacement and migration, but it is also fast-paced, often humorous and full of lyric power. The prose is snappy and contemporary, but Wieringa's themes are timeless ones.'
(Patrick McGuinness)'Structurally sound and highly intelligent. Wieringa will make you think and keep you reading eagerly to the final page.'
(Claire Lowdon Times Literary Supplement)'Tommy Wieringa can do poetry ... but that's not what makes this book such a bewitching delight. What Wieringa does best is people; with a few cherry-picked words he creates a townful of wholly believable, empathetic characters, each subtly leaking their own past, so that within a few pages the reader is surrounded by voices, in turns funny, bitter, hopeful, melancholy, gleefully mercenary and tenderly benign ... I can't recommend this profound, thoughtful, truthful book enough.'
(Jane Graham Big Issue)'Poetic, ambitious ... The pricelessness of our common humanity is one of numerous heavyweight ideas Wieringa balances carefully on his novel’s laden back ... Short, freighted words and sentences carry the novel’s ambiguous, questing symbolism.'
(Phoebe Taplin Guardian)'Superb ... Within pages it becomes clear that this is a rare novel possessed with a sense of place and a purpose. In ways a parable about displacement, encompassing the emotional, the spiritual and the psychological, it has cohesion and urgency, balancing the ordinary with the extreme horrors of a news bulletin. Sam Garrett’s fluid translation not only renders the exchanges into authentic dialogue but also conveys the natural rhythms of Wieringa’s descriptive prose, as well as the internal tone shifts ... This is a bravura performance. Far closer to Joseph Conrad than one might expect, it makes a case for the saving power of small continuities.'
(Eileen Battersby Irish Times)'Quietly compelling ... Simply but intriguingly told.'
(Lesley McDowell Sunday Herald)'This is a landmark novel which, alongside intelligence, discipline and originality, also shows Wieringa’s lust for perfection.'
(de Volkskrant)'Wieringa leaves no doubt as to what it is about ― what people believe. Everything revolves around the meaning they give to events. An unusually clever novel.'
(NRC Handelsblad)'These Are the Names unfolds gently ... The characterisation is superb but not at the expense of the plot.' *****
(Guy Pringle Newbooks)'A haunting page-turner.'
(The Weekend West)"About this title" may belong to another edition of this title.
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