NPR, by Annalisa Quinn, 4/6/22
“The Candy House is a brilliant portrait of intersecting lives”
Reviews
Slate, by Laura Miller, 4/5/22
“Jennifer Egan’s House of Wonders: Her radiant new novel explores what role the imagination can still play in a world overwhelmed by technology”
The Tampa Bay Times, by Colette Bancroft, 3/31/22
“A ‘sibling novel’ to her Pulitzer-winning “A Visit From the Goon Squad” brings back its vivid characters and lively plots.”
USA Today, by Mark Athitakis, 4/2/22
“Egan’s audacity is welcome. Anything that’s a challenge to the algorithm is a gift to humanity – and to fiction.”
San Francisco Chronicle, by Allison Arieff, 3/29/22
“This is a beautiful exploration of loss, memory and history, a not too subtle critique of what is lost when we live our lives online.”
Minneapolis Star-Tribune and St-Louis Post Dispatch, by Ellen Akins, 4/1/22
“Each [chapter] has its own language, its own tropes and terms, which Egan somehow manages to use and skewer at the same time, while maintaining the mystery that makes each person unique and worth knowing.”
Real Simple, by Kristyn Kusek Lewis, April 2022
” The Candy House…is unlike anything you’ve read…With multiple perspectives and styles (there’s a chapter composed solely of tweets), this mind-bending novel is a wild ride.”
Not available online
Oprah Daily Spring Books Preview–#1 Pick!! 4/1/22
“Dazzling and provocative…Egan’s technical brio enriches her humane and timely novel, hinting at the risks and rewards in a brave new coded world.”
Oprah Daily, by Stacy D’Erasmo, 2/1/22
“Fans of Jennifer Egan’s breakout hit and Pulitzer Prize-winning 2010 novel A Visit from the Goon Squad will be thrilled to know that its ‘sibling novel,’ The Candy House, is here at last…Egan’s prose is as lithe and knowing as ever, tender toward human folly, but highly aware of how flawed we all are… In the future, no matter their day jobs helping eluders, novelists may still be the ones who will remind us of this interconnectedness so movingly and beautifully, and as Egan does so well in these intricately woven pages.”
The Boston Globe, by Priscilla Gilman, 3/31/22
“Dizzying and dazzling… intricate and brilliantly conceived… As we follow the pebbles and crumbs Egan so cannily lays out, readers may feel at times as disoriented or wonderstruck as children making their way through a dark forest, at others electrifyingly clear-sighted, ecstatically certain of the novel’s wisdom, capacious philosophical range, truth and beauty…THE CANDY HOUSE is a marvel of a novel that testifies to the surpassing power of fiction.”
Dwight Garner, The New York Times, 3/30/21
“Sometimes…you pick up a novel and it makes your skin prickle…Jennifer Egan’s new one, The Candy House, is one of these novels…Egan has a zonking sense of control; she knows where she’s going and the polyphonic effects she wants to achieve, and she achieves them, as if she were writing on a type of MacBook that won’t exist for another decade.”
The Harvard Crimson, 2/15/22
‘The Candy House’ Review: A Brilliant Tale Exploring the Human Side of Technology
Booklist 2/1/22 (starred review)
“Haunting and often hilarious, this is a wondrous, riotously inventive work of speculative fiction that celebrates the power of the imagination in the face of technology that threatens to do our thinking for us.”
Library Journal, 1/1/22 (starred review)
“A forceful, wonderfully fragmented novel of a terrifyingly possible future, as intellectually rigorous as it is formally impressive, and yet another monumental work from Egan.”
Kirkus Reviews, 12/24/21 (starred review)
“A thrilling, endlessly stimulating work that demands to be read and reread.”
Publisher’s Weekly, 12/23/21 (starred review)
“Egan returns to the fertile territory and characters of A Visit from the Goon Squad with an electrifying and shape-shifting story that one-ups its Pulitzer-winning predecessor.”
Sydney Morning Herald, 12/15/17
“Manhattan Beach looks to the past for inspiration, turning to the events of the Depression and World War II to tell a story that is at once a celebration of personal possibility and a portrait of a moment of transformative change.”
The Georgia Straight, 11/23/17
“Manhattan Beach is a novel of sifting layers, of looming shadows, a subsurface exploration of the depths and mysteries within each of us, with moments that will provide a startled shock of recognition. It’s a wonder.”
Brooklyn Rail, 12/13/17
In the end, with Manhattan Beach, Jennifer Egan has gone above and beyond in meeting the challenge facing every storyteller—to make the lives of seemingly ordinary people extraordinary.
Commentary Magazine, 10/17/17
Manhattan Beach is an old-fashioned historical novel about a young woman growing up in Brooklyn during the 1930s and ’40s. It has a grand, 19th-century elasticity: There are confusions of love, parties, shoot-outs, shipwrecks, and torrid, meaningful sex. But however varied Egan’s subjects and her narrative approach, her themes are constant: identity, transformation, and the desperate illusions of finding fulfillment.
London Review of Books, 11/28/17
“In writing a historical novel about organised labour, organised crime and the war, Egan has taken on two challenges: to document the past without being boring or hokey, and to reveal something new about a period whose mythologies and aesthetics still have meaning to us… The mythopoeic both enriches and confuses Manhattan Beach by expanding it beyond its setting – war becomes War, quest becomes Quest.”
The Guardian Podcast (UK), 11/21/17
“Although we live in a continuous present, technology changes constantly and everyone feels old.”
“Good With Her Hands” on Public Books, 10/02/17
“Egan knows that our technology and the way we use it is all about humanity.”