The Kindly Ones

The force and cool detachment with which author Jonathan Littell describes the physical realities of war and mass murder are searing. He has spent years on his research and clings closely to the historical record but this fictional presentation brings the accounts horrifically alive

Mary Brodbin, Socialist Review

It's a compelling and provocative novel

Charlotte Stretch, Time Out

A compelling and savage tale, with a cold dispassionate eye that never flinches from the raw reality of mass-murder... a serious attempt to describe the terrors of the Nazi regime

Independent

The book rises magnificently to its own occasions, building out of its fact-crammed but stately sentences a vast and phosphorescent tableaux vivants seething with Dantesque detail

Guardian

Grotesque, dismaying, chilling in its focus on the fine detail of barbarism, this epic of evil is also addictively readable

Boyd Tonkin, Independent on Sunday

It's an amazing picture of evil, wonderfully written (and very well translated from the original French by Charlotte Mandell), and left me feeling as though I had supped with the damned

Jane Knight, The Times

Jonathan Littell veers between brilliance and bathos...

Sally Cousins, The Telegraph

I dedicated most of the summer to Jonathan Littell's much-praised, internationally bestselling blockbuster and loved almost every minute of it...a magnificent achievement

James Delingpole, Spectator

A masterpiece

Antony Beevor, Seven Magazine, Sunday Telegraph Books of the Year

An immense novel...The depth of detail is astounding and authentic

Doug Kemp, Historical Novels Review

Its account of Nazi cruelty, chaos and callousness has never been surpassed in fiction... Unforgettable...magnificent

London Review of Books

The Kindly Ones has been hailed as the return of the great European realistic novel.

Sunday Herald

Everybody's talking about it...erudite, pitiless and mesmerising

Financial Times

An extraordinarily powerful novel that leads the stunned reader on a journey through some of the darkest recesses of European history...reveals something that is desperate and depressing but profoundly important, now as ever

Observer

It is a great achievement to have made this horrific tale recounted by such a profoundly unsympathetic character so gripping...a great work of literary fiction, to which readers and scholars will turn for decades to come

Anthony Beevor, The Times

Nor is The Kindly Ones only a great work of history and reflection, but full of striking literary writing: consummate adagios of landscape painting; lovely images and observations...even touches of macabre humour...inescapably impressive

Carole Angier, Literary Review

[It] provides us with a remarkable, and multidimensional guide to human evil... the work itself is, above all, a tremendous argument for fiction

Michael Gove, The Times

An extremely disturbing novel

Toby Clements, Daily Telegraph

Compelling... utterly engaging... for anyone whose interest in his subjects is great to enough to bear their unflinching portrayal The Kindly Ones is an essential novel

Chris Power, The Times

A remarkable and controversial novel

Jason Burke, Observer