“This is a real tour de force, a stylish and brilliant conjuration of a 19th century inventor’s world. Memorable characters against a vividly realised background. This one is masterly.”
—Mary Renault
“There can no longer be any question whatever that MacDonald Harris is one of our major novelists.”
—Los Angeles Times Book Review
“The author’s unruffled direction-finding in the cross-currents that he loosed, his command of language (languages, too: French, German, and Swedish, plus some confident echoes of Greek and Latin) and his avoidance, perhaps excision, of the obvious made me follow his tragedy (yes) happily and without pity or terror.”
—Richard Usborne, Times Literary Supplement
“Metaphysics, science, sex, the romance of ballooning, turn of the century charm, all combine in a lyrical, deliciously comic and moving novel. Wonderful entertainment in the very best Jules Verne tradition.”
—Publishers Weekly
“Chilling and comic…carefully fashioned…an unusual mixture of Arctic Adventure and Parisian love story…told with fin de siecle elegance…ingenious…as highly polished as an antique machine on view in a glass case.”
—Kirkus Reviews
“The Balloonist just took me over. I loved it. It’s wisely, wittily and sensitively written. It evoked childhood memories of Jules Verne and more recent memories of The French Lieutenant’s Woman. It is an immensely entertaining book that is, at the same time, much more, interweaving the scientific, the sensual, and the philosophic. I couldn’t put it down. I was sorry when it ended. I’m sure I won’t be alone.”
—Martin Myers
“Harris’s range is, in fact, immense. Genuinely cosmopolitan, yet without the pretensions, he deeply knows and loves the many foreign languages, landscapes and mythologies that figure in his books.…Harris is an erudite writer, well versed not only in the history and arts of the past but in science and technology as well.”
—Michael Malone, Philadelphia Inquirer
“Mr Harris is an elegant and fastidious writer, and thinking man’s novelist, with a penchant for international situations and polyglot dialogue.”
—James Mellow, The New York Times Book Review
“Not only nature but the human world is searchingly portrayed. Particularly in his self-analysis, the author is relentless.”
—Los Angeles Times Book Review
“It is his oddball, icily narcissistic way of telling things that lifts The Balloonist above the level of old-fashioned adventure yarn to that of ruminative elegance.”
—Robert Nye, The New York Times Book Review
“A gifted craftsman, a meticulous writer whose powers as a story teller are as compelling as the sexual tensions he imagines.”
—Chicago Tribune Book World