The End

A masterful novel... Full of wisdom, consequence and grace, Salvatore Scibona's radiant debut brims with the promise of a remarkable literary career, of which The End is only the beginning

Annie Dillard

By hijacking the realism of the immigrant novel with a metaphysics of his own, Scibona has created a daring, haunting addition to, and extension of, the genre

Fran Bigman, Times Literary Supplement

Crammed with clever, striking imagery and vivid passages of almost poetic dialogue... it's a work that exerts a hold over the reader, becoming incrasingly gripping as it progresses

Daily Mail

Dealing with issues of identity and abandonment, and with an underlying sense of racial menace, this debut is difficult, dark and slyly humorous

Eithne Farry, Marie Claire

Engulfing. Entangled. Fate-laden. Flinty. Dry-eyed. Memento meets Augie March. Didion meets Hitchcock. Serpentine. Alien. American. Ohioan. McCarthyite (Cormac). Bellowed (Saul)

Esquire

In his lyrical debut novel, The End, Salvatore Scibona brilliantly captures how this time warp lurks at the center of family life...In aiming to trace elements more than sentimental about relationships, though, Scibona has bravely reached beyond the familiar tricks of the realistic family novel. He has unleashed metaphors and ideas that have their own dark logic

Boston Globe

It may have taken a while for Scibona to get to this side of the Atlantic, but The End suggests this is the beginning of a fascinating career from an important new American voice

Stuart Evers, Daily Telegraph

Its careful plotting and graceful language certainly show it to be a work of exquisite control

Los Angeles Times

Its moments of sharply realised emotional pull and gentle beauty reel you in

Metro

Like no other contemporary writer, Salvatore Scibona is heir to Saul Bellow, Graham Greene and Virginia Woolf, and his masterful novel stands as proof of it - a concordance of the immigrant experience from the beautiful to the brutal and everything in between

ZZ Packer

Scibona excels at the creation of character

Jonathan Barnes, Literary Review

Scibona is a gutsy, heart-and-soul writer, unafraid of emotion and ready to take risks

Rosemary Goring, Herald

Scibona loves language and recognizes the power of using the right word. He seems better educated than most American writers, with a strong vocabulary and rich ideas that urge him to build complex sentences.... To the reader's enrichment, The End is an outstanding work in all the right ways

Annie Proulx, Guardian

Scibona's formidable first novel is an evocative portrait of the American immigrant experience...What is most striking is how Scibona captures the sights, sounds and smells of immigrant life at a time when a generation of newcomers was merging into the mainstream.

Stephen Amidon, Sunday Times

There is an intensity of purpose to Salvatore Scibona's endeavour that is decidedly uncommon in a debut novel.... There is no doubt whatsoever of the beauty or brilliance of Scibona's writing

Olivia Laing, Observer

This is an extraordinary novel about the experience of immigration; unsentimental and beautifully written

Kate Saunders, The Times

This ravenous prose offers its share of challenges, but Scibona's portrayal of the lost world of Elephant Park is a literary tour de force

Publisher's Weekly

To write a stream-of consciousness story set over one day immediately invites comparisons with James Joyce and Virginia Woolf. It is a mark of how good a writer Scibona is that he survives such comparisons

Catherine Nixey, Spectator