The Independent
A vividly drawn tale of war, art and sexuality.
Open Letters Monthly
Superb.
[Woodward’s]
best and most ambitious novel to date, a compulsively readable onion-peel of a book in the course of which any sane reader will gradually come to doubt every single claim Kenneth Brill makes about himself and yet will simultaneously come to feel this may be the most dauntingly honest narrator of any novel so far this year. A novel that defies reduction — an opulent and stunningly sly performance.
Providence Journal
A hard-to-put-down tale of deception. Finely written, with rich detail and vivid descriptions of people and place.
Minneapolis Star Tribune
Rich thematic material. The book is a war novel, country novel, campus novel,
coming-of-age novel, gay novel, courtroom novel, and romance novel. Woodward has a knack for sketching striking and memorable scenes.
Times Literary Supplement
Clever, subtle, and rewarding. An ambitious investigation into the nature of truth. Ingenious.
Criminal Element
A
thorough novel of intrigue covering one of the shakiest times in history.
Woodward plays with the novel’s language, with the novel’s structure, and makes the reader wonder what to believe. And, in the end, maybe we believe it all.
The New York Times Book Review
A complicated and compelling novel about an enigmatic and eccentric artist. A portrait of an artist as a young man, with a very unreliable artist constructing the narrative. It’s an experiment in storytelling, a mystery that unfolds by impressively alternating between three time frames. It’s an amalgam of genres —
Romantic poetry, Gothic romance, and World War II adventure all inflect the writing — stitched together by the singularity of its narrator’s voice. An ambitious, rangy and unusual novel. Something to admire.
Booklist (starred review)
Psychologically astute. In a style similar to John Irving, poet and novelist Gerard Woodward presents a deliciously elegant, leisurely paced, and thought-provoking story that alternately has readers chuckling under their breath and weeping with pity. Reminiscent of Billy Abbott (from Irving's In One Person, 2012) and Calliope Stephanides (from Eugenides' Middlesex, 2002), Kenneth Brill may be a sly chameleon, but he’s a fascinating one. Puzzling and absolutely absorbing, this literary character study keeps you guessing.
The Daily Mail
This is a huge, complex novel, at turns both blackly funny and bleakly moving, driven by truly original characters, rich in obscure pieces of knowledge, evocative of a long-lost, little-known past, and always absorbing - in a word, a masterpiece.
Historical Novel Society
Beautifully descriptive and often dark, bordering on the edges of morality, but with touches of humor.
