On the Edge

Utterly convincing in its psychological details, but also memorable for the beauty of its writing and rhythms

Colm Tóibín

Chirbes, one of Spain’s premier writers, is at his best when fully immersed, as he is in this novel. If Proust and an Old Testament prophet had collaborated to write about Spain’s recession, it might have been something like the writing here - agonized, dense, full of rage, and difficult to forget

Publishers Weekly

On the Edge, Chirbes’s masterpiece, arrives as a message in a bottle among all the cans, rusting appliances, and tangled tackle. The fumes of the lagoon mix with the lingering sulfur of the Atocha railway-station bombing; the Spanish economy has all but collapsed. Who, or what, is to blame? Chirbes’s novel accuses everyone

Joshua Cohen, Harper's

On the Edge is masterful, a centrifugal novel with sentences like sticky tentacles that clutch onto readers and suck them into a swirling, tempestuous, pulsating center

Valerie Miles

A moving, densely detailed portrait of people without hope

Kirkus Reviews

This is the great novel of the crisis. The corrosive voice of Rafael Chirbes paints a portrait of a universe of unemployment and disappointment?the long hangover that follows the party of corruption

El País

Literature, as Adorno once said, is a clock that keeps ticking. But it is also the best tool for understanding the world when reality is torn to shreds. Both rules are strictly complied with by great authors. And Rafael Chirbes is one of them

El Mundo

A dizzying survey of the last 90 years of Spanish history... Margaret Jull Costa's incandescent translation carries along Esteban's turbulent torrent... When this book finally releases its grip, you may find your lapels sullied by grubby fingerprints you are in no rush to scrub out

Mara Faye Lethem, New York Times

Chirbes has lent his main narrator an engaging voice of cultured pessimism… On the Edge is at its best when it locks the reader into Esteban’s fluid internal monologue. From this a fascinating portrait emerges of a whole society… This is a disquieting and consistently illuminating novel.

Times Literary Supplement

Stand[s] out among contemporary Spanish fiction.

Liza Cox, Totally Dublin

Exhilarating… Chirbes is a novelist who asks a lot of his readers… If you meet the demand, you are richly rewarded.

Allan Massie, Scotsman

Over the past decade, [Chirbes] has become justly celebrated in Spain for his ambitious, panoramic novels about the economic crisis, political corruption and their attendant social ills – one of his best works produced in this line is [On The Edge]’

Times Literary Supplement

One of the finest Spanish novelists of his generation… An exhilarating ride.

Yorkshire Post

An impassioned examination of the Spanish collapse.

David Mills, Sunday Times

A wise, topical and important book.

Lucy Chatburn, Bookmunch

We benefit greatly from this rangy, relentless and damning view from below

Guardian