The Heavenly Table

The Heavenly Table is a ferociously gothic ballad about desperate folks with improbable dreams and scant means. It is potent and chimeric, dank, violent, swamped in tragedy—and funny as hell.

Daniel Woodrell, author of The Maid's Version and Winter's Bone

The Heavenly Table is the latest and strongest evidence that Donald Ray Pollock is one of the most talented and original writers at work today. With uniquely vivid and graceful prose he renders a tale destined to linger in the reader’s mind, a story by turns violent and darkly amusing, and always powerful. The novel is sure to be ranked among the year’s best.

Michael Koryta, New York Times-bestselling author of Those Who Wish Me Dead

In a crowded room full of voices, Don Pollock’s voice is so distinct you’ll hear first and won’t ever, ever forget it. Nor will you want to. And the kicker is this: He somehow keeps getting better.

Tom Franklin, author of Poachers and Crooked Letter, Crooked Letter

The Heavenly Table is brilliant and unforgettable. In his trademark blend of humor and pathos, Donald Ray Pollock gives us a view into life's dark corners, without ever forgetting there is a lighter side as well

Philipp Meyer, author of American Rust and The Son

Donald Ray Pollock is a master-worker. This great novel flows like buttermilk, so smooth and entertaining that you won't be ready for the left hook it delivers to your heart or its sophisticated moral analysis of human life. Pollock has an omniscient eye like Gogol, taking in a vast scene while spinning tales within tales. Readers will love him, writers will study him.

Atticus Lish, author of Preparation for the Next Life

Full of bright-hued mayhem and scatological wit... A darkly comic gorefest by a gifted writer.

Kirkus

With furious prose and a Faulknerian eye for character... Pollock's gothic, relentless imagination seduces readers into a fertile time in America's history, exploring the chaos, wonder, violence, sexuality, and ambition of a nation on the cusp of modernity - and the outmoded notion of redemption in a world gone to hell.

Publishers Weekly

Donald Ray Pollock’s brilliant Western is an earthy, raunchy read – Dickensian in its rogue’s gallery of oddball characters. Full of black humour, it’s superbly constructed and written with true grit. By the end, one is left longing for more and panting for the movie that will surely come

John Harding, Daily Mail

Wild, rollicking, and wonderfully vulgar… A riotous satire that takes on our hopeless faith in modernity, along with our endless capacity for cruelty and absurd pretension.

New York Times

Jauntily amoral, amusingly macabre… A beach read to enjoy on the shore of a lake of fire.

Wall Street Journal

His best work yet.

Boston Globe

In its bloody, violent, terrible collisions, The Heavenly Table feels like Blood Meridian if Cormac McCarthy had been born with a streak of black humor in him rather than just terseness and rage.

NPR

There is something of the Coen Brothers in The Heavenly Table. This too is southern gothic… with a cast of grotesques, eccentric plot twists and humour of the blackest pitch… Pollock writes like an angel – an angel that has escaped from Knockemstiff lunatic asylum.

The Times

A tale of weird and darkly funny invention.

Sunday Times

Truly fabulous… A very wry comedy… When reviewing, I usually mark down pages with particularly well-honed phrases: I stopped doing so when reading The Heavenly Table as I probably would have bookmarked every page…Witty and expansive… I am tempted to say that anyone wanting to understand contemporary America’s political direction might be well advised to start with this novel.

Stuart Kelly, Scotsman

Dark, violent and funny, this book will be like nothing else you've ever read

Evening Standard

A fine (and often very funny) multi-stranded yarn, set at the dawn of US involvement in WW1 with the nation on the cusp of modernity. As Tarantino's The Hateful Eight dared onscreen, The Heavenly Table lances the boil of modern America on the page.

The Skinny

Pollock’s freewheeling, blood-spilling story is well matched by his prose.

Literary Review

The darkest of Southern Noir… You’ll need a strong stomach and may want a hot shower afterward, but you’ll never forget Pollock’s compelling characters.

Crime Fiction Lover

The Heavenly Table is daft, and gruesome, and offensive, and loads of fun to read.

New Statesman

A blood-laced tale of three brothers who rob and kill their way across the US. [The Heavenly Table] will be a book you won’t be able to stop recommending once you’ve finished… A bit like reading Hunter S Thompson crossed with Cormac McCarthy – and a sprinkling of Nick Cave chucked in for brutal measure. It’s the kind of book you just know the Coen Brothers are itching to adapt, with its vast array of quirky characters and black humour

ShortList

This is gritty western noir at its best, with impeccably placed humour and gruesome graphic scenes… Pollock writes with such fluidity and emotive intensity about his deprived and often depraved characters, about the hardship and savagery in their lives, and of their grit and determination to better themselves. They are so fabulously drawn that, at times, it feels as if the Jewett boys could just ride off the pages in a blaze of dust… it would make an excellent introduction for newcomers to the world of Mr Pollock, who is in my opinion a cracker of a storyteller.

Nudge

Pollock makes you root for the three dirt-poor outlaws in this wicked world and writes like an angel – an angel that has escaped from a lunatic asylum.

Robbie Millen, The Times

This is an often violent, frequently hilarious and always engaging novel that will keep you on the edge of your seat. The text is rich with literary echoes, but Pollock’s deadpan style and imaginative daring are entirely his own.

Simon Shaw, Mail on Sunday

Dark, violent and very, very funny, The Heavenly Table is part Western, part crime novel about flawed characters looking for a little bit of happiness as they hurtle into a frightening and uncertain future. It’s a brilliant mix of Elmore Leonard and James Lee Burke – and there is no higher praise.

Sun