“I find myself nervous, to a degree I don’t recall in my past as a reviewer, about failing the work, inadequately displaying its brilliance.”

-Front Page, The New York Times Book Review

“Tolstoy. . . Stephen Crane. . . Stendahl. . . now — daringly, dazzlingly — Mark Helprin stakes a present claim to membership in these later ranks. . . . He succeeds triumphantly.”

-Front Page, The Chicago Tribune Book Review

“Fit to stand alongside the works of Erich Maria Remarque, and, yes, Hemmingway’s A Farewell to Arms. . . . Helprin has written a monumental novel.”

-Front Page, The Washington Post Book Review

“Constant brilliance. . . . Rarely less than breathtaking. . . .Every single story sings with purity, vibrates with light and dedicated honesty of vision.”

–The Cleveland Plain Dealer

“A kind of genius.”

–The Spectator, London

“Joyce and Nabokov could produce verbal astonishments as readily. Not many others come to mind. ”

–Time

“Stunning . . . moving . . . electrifying . . . . Helprin is. . . a writer who can leave you breathless with his command of the language . . . . He speaks with the tongues of angels. ”

–San Francisco Chronicle

“In the best traditions of Pasternak. . . just as compelling and satisfying to the reader.”

-Front Page, The New York Times Book Review

“A testament to Helprin’s special genius – his ability to evoke a time and place so authentically, it is hard to imagine that he didn’t live through the Second World War or visit a newly liberated Paris.”

–Esquire

“Lyrical, thrilling and at times astonishing. ”

-Chicago Tribune

“Helprin builds superbly to a two-part finale . . . and the harmonization of the dual climaxes results in passages so gorgeous and stirring that I was moved to read them out loud. ”

–The Wall Street Journal

“The last epic novelist . . . ..Helprin’s influences tend to other centuries, to Shakespeare and Melville . . . . [He] takes the long view, and in that maybe there is a lesson for those who have given up on ambition. If his latest novel is a book out of time, perhaps it holds clues as to where the novel ought to go from here. ”

–Esquire

“[He] produces a kind of music that few living writers know how to create. ”

–The Wall Street  Journal

“Helprin, author of the indelible Winter’s Tale and A Soldier of the Great War, has always been most comfortable in the epic mode, retaining a classicist’s eye for beauty while preserving enough of the contemporary world to speak to the present. His prose has an aching beauty that stems from his unembarrassed devotion to tradition.”

–The Boston Globe

“Mark Helprin should win the Nobel Prize. . . . He is closer to Victor Hugo or Alexandre Dumas than to any contemporary novelist I know of. ”

–National Review

“Helprin is the closest thing modern culture has to such esteemed figures as John Keats and Walter Pater . . . . Though Modernists and Post-Modernists have undoubtedly dominated the twentieth century, and the beginning of the twenty-first century, I do foresee the pendulum-swing back . . . [with] Mark Helprin as a leading figure of the 21st century Renaissance.”

–Huffington Post

“If America, France, and the rest of the West succeed in revitalizing their political and literary culture, one sign of it will be more writing that approaches the elegance, intelligence, and grandeur of Helprin’s work. ”

–City Journal

“With riotous energy and sustained brilliance . . . Helprin lights his own way, in his own singular direction.”

–Time

“Helprin is an American treasure. . . . There are lesser, younger lights working the mines, but we’re talking modern legends here. . . . If only a few hundred other writers had followed his lead, we might have been spared years and years of jilted lover’s breath turning into vampiric butterflies and dead grandmothers appearing from the jungle haze. ”

–The Federalist

“He creates tableaux of such beauty and clarity that the inner eye is stunned. ”

–Publisher’s Weekly