PRAISE FOR DIEGO MARANI AND NEW FINNISH GRAMMAR

‘This is an extraordinary book, as good as Michael Ondaatje’s The English Patient and with a similar mystery at its heart.’ Spectator

‘Beautifully written and translated, and beautifully original.’ The Times

‘This identity thriller delivers plot, bodies and clues—as well as poetic musings on national and individual identity. Marani is obsessed by language and how it defines us.’ Independent

‘Marani’s miraculous novel is profound, moving, elusive and tragic.’ Irish Times

‘This is a desperately sad book. It takes its place beside Romantic stories of Kaspar Hauser and the Wolf Boy of Aveyron, which have haunted the European imagination for two centuries…Judith Landry is to be congratulated on her seamless translation from the Italian.’ New Statesman

‘We soon forget we are reading an English translation of an Italian novel. Sheer narrative vim is one reason for this…What gives New Finnish Grammar its true interest, however, is its evocation of a place and language foreign to the author yet, to all appearances, intimately familiar.’ Times Literary Supplement

‘I like the solitariness and separateness of the characters in New Finnish Grammar. Isolated personages sending to one another messages that may never even be read, let alone understood or answered—there should be more such stuff in fiction.’ Gerald Murnane

‘A thoroughly European sensibility: intellectual, melancholy, mysterious, imbued with a sense of tragedy and history.’ Independent on Sunday

‘It is wise and well crafted. Beautifully written—what a translation!’ Craig Sherborne on New Finnish Grammar