A beautiful, engrossing and fascinatingly structured novel. Lucid, limpid, savage. Tyll quietly intrudes on our present crisis of European identity. Have four centuries made us any wiser? This novel is a masterly achievement, a work of imaginative grandeur and complete artistic control - Ian McEwan This is abrilliant and unputdownable novel. Kehlmann is the true inheritor of the German fabulist tradition that stretches back to the Brothers Grimm and even further, and in the legendary prankster figure of Tyll Ulenspiegel he has found his perfect avatar - Salman Rushdie Kehlmann is one of the brightest, most pleasure-giving writers at work today, and he manages all this while exploring matters of deep philosophical and intellectual import - Jonathan Franzen Daniel Kehlmann is one of the great novelists for making giant themes seem light - Adam Thirlwell The best novel Kehlmann has ever written . unlike Measuring the World, this novel is a deeply affecting, lively, brutal, wonderfully unreserved, modern, romantic German epic . Tyllis Kehlmann's victory over history, his historic triumph - Der Spiegel A masterpiece . the most extraordinary European novel for many years .

a brilliant book of stories, of great drama, cinematic and poetic . Kehlmann is at the height of his powers - Neue Zurcher Zeitung The main difference to Measuring the Worldis the tone which reflects the terrible events: the destruction of the world . Kehlmann's storytelling is astonishing - Die Welt Kehlmann's best novel so far . amidst the destruction, in the places where nothing reflects the former inhabitants anymore, it is the dead who show themselves . we owe it to this novel that we can see the dead more clearly, so clearly that it hurts - Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung.