Boyle offers a cautionary account of those heady days as the Loney family suffers the personal costs of free love and freak-outs -- Jeffrey Burke * Mail on Sunday *
A pitch-dark sex comedy -- Anthony Cummins * Daily Mail *
The undisputed master ... Boyle is brilliant at charting the currents of euphoria and idealism around Leary, the phantasmagorical effects of LSD, and Fitz's eventual slide into self-destruction. Boyle blurs the boundaries between the fact and fiction, adding a novelistic shimmer and richness to what the histories already tell us ... A roller-coaster morality tale of the road of excess leading to the palace of wisdom -- Mick Brown * Daily Telegraph *
Boyle renders the hypnotic, quasi-academic mood of the commune skilfully, capturing the participants' initial belief that this was a serious spiritual quest. This moment in the mid-Sixties before the bonkers hippy movement of the west coast took over the counter-culture from the intellectuals from the east, is fascinating ... As the story of one man's descent into madness, and the folly of communal living and doing drugs for breakfast it's a thrilling read * The Times *
A virtuoso performance by Boyle - joyous, mad-scientist slapstick, frightening, profound and even erotic * Herald *
By far and away one of the most inventive, adventurous and accomplished fiction writers in the US today ... A mesmerising storyteller -- Lionel Shriver
Boyle is a writer who chooses a large canvas and fills it to the edges -- Barbara Kingsolver
A virtuoso craftsman -- Annie Proulx
Funny, but not always in a way you can laugh at. Boyle's dissections are far too accurate. One moment you're watching the antics of a narcissistic cast; the next you're finding it all heartbreakingly human -- M John Harrison
You don't feel cheated, reading Boyle - while the head knows there's manipulation and artifice, the heart thumps * Observer *
Boyle has a talent for describing events we may never experience with an arresting matter-of-factness. There is a thrill to this, and to not knowing where he will take us next -- Chris Power * Guardian *
A sort of Frank Zappa of American letters ... Like the Beat writers before him, Boyle documents American life in the underbelly. Boyle is incapable of writing a boring sentence ... he is a master of the short story form * Financial Times *
Thomas Coraghessan Boyle isn't the first writer to probe the American malaise, but he makes a two-fisted, Technicolor job of it * Sunday Times *
Masterful -- Philip Womack * Daily Telegraph *
Brilliant ... His characters are portrayed with sympathy and internal complexity, even if they're still crazy * New Statesman *
One of our finest chroniclers ... Boyle is always going outside himself, jumping into foreign skins ... The best of Boyle's novels warn against the varieties of human extremism: our problems may be grave, he often says, but we make them worse by acting on our unexamined impulses and convictions * Independent *
