The Mark and the Void

[This] is the answer to the question of what a seriously talented contemporary novelist should be writing... Impossibly ingenious, unabashedly intelligent, read-the-whole-page-again funny and engaged with the great questions of our times... The Mark and the Void is the best novel I have reviewed on this side of the Atlantic... I'm recommending it unreservedly

Observer

The Mark and the Void is Murray's best book yet - a wildly ambitious, state-of-the-nation novel, and a scabrously funny yet deeply humane satire on the continuing fall-out of the biggest financial crisis in 75 years

The Bookseller

Publisher's description. The Mark and the Void is a whip-smart tragicomic novel for our times, a darkly hilarious journey through the upside-down world of investment banking. In the midst of the global financial crisis, friendship blossoms between a lonely French banker and an incompetent Irish novelist, and chaos ensues...

Penguin

The Mark and the Void is a hilarious, blade-sharp satire on the banking system featuring vividly drawn characters, and it is, once again, the funniest book I've read this year...A joy from start to finish

Independent

Exuberantly inventive satire...a sustained tour de force of thrilling prose, memorable characters and trenchant humour. Look on, ye bankers, and despair!

Mail on Sunday

Paul Murray has produced a comic classic that cements his status as one of the most gifted novelists of his generation. Funny, angry and unputdownable'

Daily Express

This novel's arrival deserves a trumpeting fanfare . . . curiously brilliant, intricately entertaining . . . Banker plus struggling novelist equals page turner

Sunday Independent

The Mark and the Void is so sensationally good...it takes the global financial crisis by its throat, and shakes it into giving birth to a wild, intelligent, angry, witty, uproariously funny, devastating novel

Neel Mukherjee

Funny, moving, utterly brilliant

Irish Times, on Skippy Dies

An unforgettably exuberant saga

Emma Donoghue, on Skippy Dies, Daily Telegraph

I loved Skippy Dies

Ali Smith, Times Literary Supplement

A fantastic novel. I laughed and wept

Bret Easton Ellis, on Skippy Dies

People always tell me 'If you love Paul Murray so much, why don't you marry him?' Now thanks to recent legislation in his native Ireland, I finally can. And so should you, reader. The Mark and the Void not only monetizes the death of the novel, but makes us believe in its resurrection. Praise the Lord for Paul Murray's big brain and tender heart!

Gary Shteyngart

Five years after his hugely successful novel Skippy Dies, Murray's third book is utterly original and very funny

Irish Times

With The Mark and the Void, Paul Murray has done the impossible: he's written a novel about international finance that not only isn't dense, boring, or annoyingly didactic, but is, in fact, a hilarious page-turner with a beating human heart. To put all of these elements in a pot and alchemically produce something so brilliant and cohesively constructed, one might assume Paul Murray is a witch. I think he's simply a great writer.

Adam Wilson, author of 'Flatscreen' and 'What's Important Is Feeling'