Praise for Notes from a Coma

“Mike McCormack’s Notes from a Coma is a bold formal experiment, buttressing a surface text of domestic realism with a footnote-bound underworld of sci-fi dystopia—and between these two worlds hangs McCormack’s voluntarily-comatose JJ O’Malley, whose life story shuttles us back and forth across the novel’s many thrilling junctions of the global and the rural, the scientific and the spiritual, the intellectual and the heartfelt. Ambitious and accomplished, Notes from a Coma is the finest book yet from one of Ireland’s most singular contemporary writers, a daring reinvention of the gothic for the age of machines.”

—Matt Bell, author of Cataclysm Baby

“A cross between 1984 and The X-Files.… Notes from a Coma establishes McCormack as one of the most original and important voices in contemporary Irish fiction.”

—Irish Times (original review)

“At times wickedly funny, at others almost unbearably sad.”

—Sunday Tribune

“McCormack’s language is lovely, lyrical … his humor is dark, macabre; the words glimmer like a spell.”

—Time Out

“The greatest Irish novel of the decade just ended.”

—Irish Times, Jan 15th 2010

Praise for Mike McCormack

“When venturing into the realm of the macabre, a writer gains a distinct advantage if he has a sense of discipline and a sense of humor … Mike McCormack has both to spare.… Like parables in their easy transcendence of setting and time, the most audacious stories are classics.”

—The New York Times Book Review

“McCormack displays the satiric sense, religious knowledge, dark humor, cutting insights and incredible imagination that made Swift famous. Then McCormack adds an overcast of modern doom and gloom with the skill of Edgar Allan Poe. The result is stunning and irresistible.”

—USA Today

“I am a huge admirer of Mike McCormack’s work. From sentence to story the writing is by times intriguing, funny, surprising, disturbing and profound.”

—Lynn Freed

“Gives Ian McEwan and Edgar Allan Poe a run for their money.… Decay and ruin seep through this book, driven by some of the finest prose to have emerged in over a decade.”

—London Independent

“McCormack’s debut crackles with wit, is laced with black insight and places him right up there with McCabe as a master of the new Irish Gothic.”

—Sunday Tribune