Whiskey Tango Foxtrot

A paranoid, sarcastic and clattering pop thriller that reads as if it were torn from the damp pages of Glenn Greenwald's fever journal ... Reading [Shafer's] prose is like popping a variant of the red pill in The Matrix: everything gets a little crisper

New York Times

Genius techno-­thriller à la Neal Stephenson, powered by social-media info-conspiracy à la Dave Eggers

Time

[It's] possible that Shafer is remaking the international thriller... An edgy, darkly comedic debut novel whose characters and premise are as up-to-the-minute as an online news feed

Kirkus Reviews

The book's fanciful premise comes to seem eerily plausible: 'How about if a shadow government is filing away everything about you?'

The New Yorker

Smart and often very funny ... Shafer etches diamond-sharp and precisely observed contemporary satire

Salon

A stylish, absorbing, sharply modern hybrid of techno-thriller and psychodrama that bristles with wit and intellect

Maggie Shipstead, author of 'Seating Arrangements'

Moving, funny, engrossing and blisteringly smart

Time, Top Ten Fiction Books of 2014

It is a joy to watch Shafer seamlessly work incisive commentary on contemporary life into a fast-paced spine-chiller

Daily Beast, The Best Fiction of 2014

Exciting, funny, moving and thought-provoking

Irish Independent

Among the hair-raising flights of fancy and irresistibly urgent plotting, Shafer alights on most of the key issues of the privacy debate ... Shafer's prose is whip-smart, funny and informal

Guardian

A fine example of what happens when big, brainy ideas are successfully mated with good old-fashioned plot thrust ... [Shafer] makes you care for his characters, even the ones with First World problems, while threading chewy techno-philosophical ideas through stretches of masterfully maintained suspense, paid off by big event-driven set-pieces (Whiskey Tango Foxtrot sometimes reads like William Gibson indulging his love of Le Carré). More, he can return the weariest soul to that glorious state of teenage binge-reading, when you'd stay up until two in the morning ... simply to find out what happens next. ... The next time the Fiction is Dead brigade demand to know why novels deserve a place in popular culture, the constant reader might well cite this book as Exhibit A for the defence

Irish Times