New Zealand Herald, 10/28/17
“Egan writes passages so well-crafted that they lift right off the page and sing.”
Reviews
The Daily Telegraph, October 2017
“Manhattan Beach becomes the stuff of Hollywood, with flashbacks, deceptions, revelations and wild twists.”
New Statesman, 10/22/17
“There’s a lot to learn from Jennifer Egan’s new novel, both about deep-sea diving during the Second World War… first rate prose that fizzed.”
Good Housekeeping, October 2017
“Jennifer Egan’s evocative writing transports us back in time.”
Literary Review (UK), 10/20/17
“Egan is at her best when representing hidden connections and transforming worlds. At these moments, Manhattan Beach comes close to being as subtle and engrossing as anything in her previous works.”
Financial Times, 10/20/17
“Flawlessly done, with enough of a spin on the usual historical-novel tropes to make the whole enterprise seem surprisingly fresh. The flawlessness includes ease of consumption: I read the book in one sitting without effort and without even noticing that I wasn’t tempted to check my social media”
Red Magazine (UK)
“Meticulously researched”
Belfast Telegraph (UK)
“… genuinely affecting and handsomely constructed”
LA Review of Books, 10/26/17
“Jennifer Egan has found the quiet melody of a young woman’s New York.”
Newsday, 10/27/17
“Alight with such moments of black comedy, this truly fine novel, so rich in period and emotional atmosphere and so cunningly plotted, is a joy (and a terror) — one of the standouts of the year.”
The Georgia Straight, 10/23/17
“Manhattan Beach is a novel about the complications of family and society, of the relationships between parents and children, and between men and women. It’s 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.”
Maine Edge, 10/18/17
“Jennifer Egan is one of the most gifted writers of her generation. Few – if any – 21st century authors have both the storytelling acumen and brilliance of wordcraft that she brings to the table.”
Philadelphia Inquirer, 10/22/17
“The sweep of this breathtaking novel spans the Great Depression, congenital physical disability, a world at war, working women’s struggle for equality, racism, abortion rights, and, of course, the wonder/terror duality of the sea.”
Globe and Mail, 10/13/17
“What is revelatory is how beautifully drawn, vivid and moving this familiar setup is when crafted by Egan’s skilled hand. Although the basic structure and setting is perhaps standard, her talent renders it anew – making Manhattan Beach a sparkling, lush epic of a novel.”
Esquire, 10/18/17
“Anna Kerrigan, Eddie’s beloved, abandoned daughter, a young woman of exceptional smarts and strength, brilliantly realised by Egan … the new book offers a wholly immersive experience. It is a novel of the sea and the land, full of watery metaphors but also concrete situations and people so real you feel you could reach out and touch them. Anna Kerrigan is her heroine for her times, and ours too. There won’t be many better works of fiction published this year.”
The Spectator, 10/14/17
“…shares with Egan’s Pulitzer Prize-winning A Visit from the Goon Squad and an earlier novel, The Keep, a vivid apprehension of the provisionality of human life and the onus on fiction to dispose itself accordingly in the attempt to capture it.”
Sunday Telegraph, 10/15/17
“Elements of noirish thriller keep you turning the pages, only stopping occasionally to marvel at another pitch-perfect description. If Philip Roth had written Manhattan Beach, they would call it a masterpiece. And maybe it is, or close.”
Metro, 10/15/17
“It’s a restless, persistently searching novel whose pleasures are old fashioned but rich.”
TLS, 10/10/17
“…What the reading public needs right now, Manhattan Beach is enormously entertaining and satisfying: an escape, perhaps, but also a reminder.”
The Atlantic, 10/10/17
“Joy, purification, renewal, death—the sea is all of these things in Manhattan Beach, Jennifer Egan’s intricately patterned and visionary new novel… Egan’s novel suggests patterns and motivations that exist at a level far deeper than rationality.”
Slate, 10/10/17
“The novel is more deeply imagined than most historical fiction; Egan summons the material and social texture of 1940s New York, from the cosmetics to the food to the sounds and smells of street and apartment and merchant marine life, so completely that the world of the novel closes over its reader’s head like the waters of Wallabout Bay engulfing Anna on her first dive.”
Brisbane Times, 10/05/17
“The novel’s overarching theme, a preoccupation of Egan’s since the September 11, 2001, attacks, is “the trajectory of American power.'”
The National (U.K.), 10/03/17
“There is something satisfying in how straightforward her new book is. It is a novel to immerse yourself in.”