Praise for Elliot Perlman
THE STREET SWEEPER
‘Excellent . . . harrowing, humane and brilliant.’
The Times
‘A wonderfully rich, engaging and multilayered story . . . [from] an author of rare erudition and compassion.’
Washington Post
‘This epic about racial persecution employs similar techniques [to Seven Types of Ambiguity] but scales up the ambition . . . The interleaved sequences set in Nazi Germany and Fifties America are so searingly potent . . . As he depicts both the kindnesses and the unspeakable cruelties of the concentration camps, Perlman fleshes out his research with a moral and imaginative force that feels revelatory . . . It demonstrates how history and fiction can converge to tell stories that cry out to be remembered.’
The Telegraph
‘An expertly told novel of life in immigrant America – and of the terrible events left behind in the old country . . . Perlman’s long tale, spanning decades, is suspenseful and perfectly told in many voices, without a false note. It deals with big issues of memory, race, human fallibilities and the will to survive against the odds.’
Kirkus Reviews (starred review)
‘Perlman deftly navigates . . . complicated waters, moving back and forth in time . . . In so doing, he brilliantly makes personal both the Holocaust and the civil rights movement, and crafts a moving and literate page-turner.’
Publishers Weekly (starred review)
‘The Street Sweeper, Elliot Perlman’s monumental and, at times, mesmerizing novel, is a meditation of memory – and its relationship to history . . . Perlman burnishes his reputation as a masterful storyteller who captures the cadences of consciousness and conversation and the varieties and vagaries of cruelty, courage and compassion . . . You will, in all likelihood, find it unforgettable.’
Jerusalem Post
‘A big, bold international work with a piercing moral sense . . . striking and enlightening . . . The novel illuminates the small acts of individual kindness, memory and compassion which must stand against the human capacity for cruelty and inhumanity.’
Prospect
‘Acclaimed Australian writer Perlman is a master at meshing characters’ streams of consciousness with social tsunamis of hate and violence. In his intensely detailed world-within-worlds third novel, this discerning and unflinching investigator of moral dilemmas great and small takes on the monstrous horrors of racism in America and the Holocaust . . . Perlman’s compulsively readable wrestle-with-evil saga is intimate and monumental, wrenching and cathartic.’
Booklist
‘In the best kind of books, there is always that moment when the words on the page swallow the world outside – subway stations fly by, errands go un-run, rational bedtimes are abandoned – and the only goal is to gobble up the next paragraph, and the next, and the next . . . [The Street Sweeper is] a towering achievement: a strikingly modern literary novel that brings the ugliest moments of 20th-century history to life, and finds real beauty there.’
Entertainment Weekly
‘On the one hand the focus is intimate, concerned with the surprisingly interconnected lives of a small number of characters in New York some years past. On the other it encompasses and – in a series of vivid primal scenes, exposes – some of the worst horrors of the 20th century . . . Some will recall . . . Les Miserables. Perlman certainly has, in this novel that shares Victor Hugo’s unrepentant digressiveness and compassionate span.’
The Age
‘This is a big fat novel filled with empathy and indignation. Every page of it dramatizes American race relations, 20th-century Jewish persecution, or class conflict – or all three . . . Perlman’s preeminent skill as a novelist seems to be for stitching together scenes and histories, in gradually interlacing the disparate strands.’
Boston Globe
‘The Street Sweeper is an epic tale that spans decades and bridges generations while chronicling the predominant chapters of racial persecution perpetrated in the darkest hours of the 20th century . . . [Perlman] shines a fresh light on the struggle of the American civil rights movement . . . The narrative pull is breathtaking [as he] pulls off the supreme feat of articulating the unspeakable . . . This stunning novel works and matters, because of the expert way Perlman has recorded both the agonized howl of the past and the plaintive echoes of the present.’
San Francisco Chronicle
SEVEN TYPES OF AMBIGUITY
‘Compulsively readable.’
New Yorker
‘Bustling, kaleidoscopic . . . There are traces of Dickens’s range in Perlman and of George Eliot’s generous humanist spirit . . . This is an exciting gamble of a novel, one willing to lose its shirt in its bid to hold you . . . Stay with it for the long haul. It’s worth it.’
New York Times (A New York Times Book Review Editors’ Choice and Notable Book of the Year)
‘This is a love story in the 19th century tradition, the kind that makes the real world seem a bit dim . . . George Eliot down under.’
Kirkus Reviews (starred review)
‘Nuanced, dynamic storytelling, layered with essential digressions on everything from psychiatry to the stockmarket.’
Washington Post
‘Dazzling . . . a page turner, a psychological thriller that is, in short, dangerous, beguiling fun.’
Newsweek
‘Elliot Perlman’s Seven Types of Ambiguity is an exemplary novel in the tradition of Thomas Hardy and the earlier D.H. Lawrence. Perlman’s power is in conveying the strife between personality and character in each of his protagonists. His prose, like his story itself, is vivid, humane, and finally optimistic in a manner that strengthens the reader’s perceptiveness.’
Harold Bloom
‘Motives are tangled, perceptions unreliable, and outcomes unexpected . . . [Perlman] has created a novel with just the right amount of meaning, intelligence, and beauty.’
Boston Globe
‘Perlman writes with such convincing simplicity – his sentences read like whiskey-fueled confessions . . . We can’t trust ourselves because Perlman makes us care too much.’
Esquire
‘[A] sophisticated psychodrama.’
Wall Street Journal
‘The scope of [Perlman’s] ambition and the strength of his achievement in portraying the psychological state of [the developed world] is unrivalled . . . We feel ourselves spiralling closer to a truth that we could not have reached through other means . . . [from] a voice in the wilderness burdened with seeing the truth.’
Times Literary Supplement
‘A colossal achievement, a complicated, driven marathon of a book . . . The opening section is a tour de force . . . At the end, in a comprehensive, an almost Shakespearian way, Perlman picks up every loose thread and knots it.’
The Observer
‘One of the best novels of recent years, a complete success.’
Le Monde
‘Has the virtues of the great modern European novel.’
Süddeutsche Zeitung
THREE DOLLARS
‘Remarkably well-written . . . funny, moving, and constantly surprising . . . It is impossible not to care what happens to Eddie, Tanya his wife, and Abby, their adorable daughter . . . Perlman is echoing Auden’s cry, “We must love one another or die.”’
Time Out (UK)
‘Constructed like a catchy pop song . . . a quirky cautionary tale that feels like a wake-up call.’
New York Times Book Review
‘Perlman moves deftly from the personal to the political, from intellectual debate to near farce to edgy tenderness. His novel gradually builds into a study of a whole generation, a sad, angry, disconcertingly funny reflection of the way we live now.’
Times Literary Supplement
‘Funny and dramatic, literary yet accessible . . . what a find this is!’
Marie Claire (Australia)
‘[The novel’s] blend of self-deprecating wit, caustic social comment, spirited sensitivity and big heart carries the narrative in beautifully controlled passages that brim with insight, humor and feeling . . . Rich with the pleasures and pains of love, family, friendship and marriage . . . Perlman’s sheer storytelling virtuosity gives this essentially domestic tale the narrative drive of a thriller and the unforgettable radiance of a novel that accurately reflects essential human values.’
Publishers Weekly (starred review)
‘Perlman is a marvellous storyteller.’
The Observer
‘Few novels ever dare to fuse emotional and economic life with the passionate intelligence of this one.’
The Independent
‘Elliot Perlman’s new novel is priceless . . . With admirable subtlety, Perlman satirizes a world in which suburban paradise and homelessness are just a single missed payment apart.’
Christian Science Monitor
‘It’s such an enormous relief to discover Elliot Perlman’s Three Dollars, a novel that is unequivocally about our times.’
The Age (Book of the Year)