The Romantics

If you buy one literary novel this year, make sure it's this

Amanda Craig, The Times

This bright new star is the real thing

David Robson, Sunday Telegraph

Grip[s] the reader as artfully and as compellingly as the first page of A Passage to India

The New York Review of Books

[A]n intriguing combination of casual grace and emotional intensity, peppered with discreet social comment on caste, class, sectarian strife, the state of the nation . . . a charming debut

The Independent

If much of cosmopolitan Indian writing has valorized the immigrant and the foreign land, then The Romantics is a celebration of the home and its forgotten world

Amitava Kumar, The Nation

[An] extraordinary debut novel . . . a supernova

The Washington Post

The Romantics looks to Flaubert's Sentimental Education, to E.M. Forster, to Turgenev. But it is the product of a distinctive and sharp intelligence

Hilary Mantel

A work of art, a first novel of the highest achievement...a writer whose work will last. Read it and find yourself at the source of something great

Candia McWilliam, Financial Times

A voice that fuses the lapidary precision of Flaubert with the meditative lyricism of Waugh's Brideshead Revisited, a voice that's alternately wry and ruminative, meticulous and expansive

Michiko Kakutani, New York Times

Many treasures in this brilliant novel

Elizabeth Hardwick

Pankaj Mishra writes the most perfect prose of any Indian novelist of his generation

William Dalrymple

Mishra's eye is sharp, his prose flawless

Time

A sensitive and introspective novel . . . a meditation on hope and failure. Mishra's evocations of Indian landscape and customs are vivid and thoughtful; his prose clean and unhampered and his descriptive passages to be savoured

Guardian

A first novel of astonishing maturity

Daily Telegraph

Mishra's lyrical descriptions . . . and the depth of culture the region offers, is a haunting reminder of India's power to bewitch

Time Out

A truly ambitious attempt to compare the way people in the East and the West dream . . . Delicate and subtly tantalising in the way only a book can really be

Vogue

It is almost as if when everyone is flashing De Beers diamonds, Mishra traps the quiet luminescence of the moonstone in his theme and style

The Hindu

[A] surprisingly assured, provocatively balanced meditation on the familiar culture flash

Boston Globe

Contemporary India is brought to vigorous, thrumming life in the pages of The Romantics

Sunday Times

Mishra's writing has a lovely potency . . . subtly layered and compelling

Times Literary Supplement

Impressive . . . The Romantics turns its back on the exotic richness and the "teeming" panoramic quality which we readily assume to be expressive of Indianness itself

Sydney Morning Herald

A first novel whose achievement is something that most writers could be proud of at any stage in their careers

Vancouver Sun