- Published: 28 May 2018
- ISBN: 9781784707965
- Imprint: Vintage
- Format: Paperback
- Pages: 496
- RRP: $22.99
The Last Samurai

















- Published: 28 May 2018
- ISBN: 9781784707965
- Imprint: Vintage
- Format: Paperback
- Pages: 496
- RRP: $22.99
A brilliant and sad book… The funniest book I’ve read in years.
Spectator
A delightful and original novel – expansive and intelligent writing
Daily Telegraph
An original, daring novel, The Last Samurai could well become a classic – accessible and as unremittingly entertaining to the casual reader as it is rewarding to those who would delve further
Times Literary Supplement
De Witt has intelligence, wit and unusual stylistic bravery
Guardian
An exhilaratingly literate and playful first novel by a fresh, electrifying talent. DeWitt goes to the top of the class...her adventurousness spins out on an epic scale
New York Times
The Last Samurai is an original work of brilliance about, in part, the limits of brilliance. And in literature as in life, DeWitt understands that what we like most of all is a good yarn
Time
Destined to become a classic
Garth Risk Hallberg
A triumph – a genuinely new story, a genuinely new form
A. S. Byatt
An ambitious, colossal debut novel
Publishers Weekly
A brilliant debut novel...keeps things moving at an exhilarating clip... DeWitt is formidably intelligent but engagingly witty
Washington Post
Helen DeWitt is a real find – I loved this book
Independent on Sunday
It is exciting for the future of the novel that a writer can do all the basic things readers need – from Peter Pan to the Odyssey, from Bleak House to The Crying of Lot 49 – and do something new with the form of the tale itself
New Yorker
DeWitt pushes against the limitations of the novel as a form; reading her, one wants to push against the limitations of one’s own brain
Paris Review
The Last Samurai is a book everyone should be talking about
Huffington Post
A singular masterpiece
Vulture
A tremendous novel. DeWitt is one of the most interesting writers working in the English language today
David Flusfeder
I adored this crazy, fabulous, lovable book… This really does deserve to be a modern classic
The Pool
Fiercely intelligent, very funny and unlike anything else I’ve ever read
Mark Haddon
A bold, brilliant book…original both in content and form… DeWitt’s zeal cannot fail to enchant
Guardian
Her style is brilliantly heartless, and cork-dry; original herself, she is a witty examiner of human and cultural eccentricity. She is, above all, playful… What grounds all DeWitt’s brilliance and game-playing is the way that she dramatizes a certain kind of hyperintelligent rationalism and probes its irregular distribution of blindness and insight…a wonderfully funny book, but comedy dances near the abyss; the apprehension of humor’s frailty links DeWitt to the tragicomic tradition of Cervantes, Sterne, and Nabokov
James Wood, New Yorker
You walk into a book due to an Akira Kurosawa link and your fondness for the great film-maker. You walk out, staggered by the book's originality and bravery... It should be read by everyone
Irish Times
DeWitt pushes enjoyably but firmly against (and sometimes beyond) the unknown capabilities of the reader
Harry Strawson, Times Literary Supplement