Star Tribune, 09/29/17
“Pulitzer winner Jennifer Egan’s new book, “Manhattan Beach,” is a thoroughly satisfying old-fashioned novel about a Brooklyn family in wartime.”
Reviews
SF Gate, 09/29/17
“… an unusually well written, well researched, emotionally satisfying page-turner — which demonstrates that the power of her work lies beyond virtuosic literary stunts.”
I News (UK), 09/29/17
“Egan is a brilliant writer. There are phrases and sentences here I wouldn’t like to have missed, and Manhattan Beach will make a splash.”
The Guardian (UK), 09/29/17
“‘Remarkable cinematic scope…This is a novel that will pull you in and under and carry you away on its riptides.”
The Boston Globe, 09/28/17
“Egan’s most remarkable accomplishment yet. . . . At once a suspenseful novel of noir intrigue, a gorgeously wrought and richly allusive literary tapestry, and a transporting work of lyrical beauty and emotional heft, “Manhattan Beach’’ is a magnificent achievement.”
Evening Standard (UK), 09/28/17
“Egan has written a gripping, modern version of a 19th-century novel.”
Newsday, 09/27/17
“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 New York Times, 09/27/17
“Immensely satisfying . . . [Manhattan Beach] is a dreadnought of a World War II-era historical novel, bristling with armaments yet intimate in tone. It’s an old-fashioned page-turner, tweaked by this witty and sophisticated writer so that you sometimes feel she has retrofitted sleek new engines inside a craft owned for too long by James Jones and Herman Wouk. . . . She is masterly at displaying mastery. . . . Egan’s fiction buzzes with factual crosscurrents, casually deployed. . . . Egan works a formidable kind of magic . . . This is a big novel that moves with agility.”
Vox, 09/26/17
“Throughout the book, Egan’s prose is as smooth and understated as her structuring: it draws absolutely no attention to itself, but there are almost no false notes. It’s windowpane prose, transparent and elegant.”
The Washington Post, 09/26/17
“…dares to satisfy us in a way that stories of an earlier age used to.”
NPR, 09/26/17
“Manhattan Beach is ambitiously and deliciously plot-driven, and it boldly helps itself to a wide library of earlier New York stories: There are echoes here of Betty Smith’s A Tree Grows in Brooklyn, the Damon Runyon tales that would became Guys and Dolls and Joseph Mitchell’s briny descriptions from The Bottom of The Harbor. . . . In drawing from the classic catalog of New York stories, Manhattan Beach also takes its place among them.”
My San Antonio, 09/25/17
“Manhattan Beach” is an enthralling work of historical fiction that weaves together beautiful imagery, an immersive story, and compelling characters into a single story of family secrets and unconditional love.”
Booklist (starred review), 8/17
“Egan’s propulsive, surprising, ravishing, and revelatory saga, a covertly profound page-turner that will transport and transform every reader, casts us all as divers in the deep, searching for answers, hope, and ascension.”
Kirkus (starred review), 6/20/17
“Realistically detailed, poetically charged, and utterly satisfying: apparently there’s nothing Egan can’t do.”
Publisher’s Weekly (starred review), 5/8/17
“Splendid…the novel is tremendously assured and rich, moving from depictions of violence and crime to deep tenderness. The book’s emotional power once again demonstrates Egan’s extraordinary gifts.”
National Post (Canada), 1/10/12
“When finally I read the first pages, I was transfixed. For the next 36 hours I found all other activities bothersome because they took me away from this marvellous book.”
The Independent (UK)
“I can’t do this 514-page novel justice in 250 words. It’s funny and serious, dry, sly and wry. The writing is as pin-sharp as the perceptions. If you didn’t read it in 2011, make it your New Year’s resolution to read it in 2012.”
The Short Review, 8/1/11
“For Egan, even tossed-off moonlight energizes and illuminates.”
Paste Magazine 5/2/11
“Again, Egan has taken a leap of faith, trusting her audience will follow her, past the old nonlinear stand-bys such as Michael Ondaatje’s The English Patient and David Mitchell’s Cloud Atlas, into even newer territory.”
London Evening Standard, 6/9/11
“A Visit From the Goon Squad is now making its own way inexorably, because almost everybody who reads it is going to recommend it to everybody they know.”
The Guardian, 4/2/11
“This is an incredibly affecting novel, sad, funny and wise, which should make Jennifer Egan’s name in the UK.”
The Telegraph, 3/26/11
“Jennifer Egan’s new novel, her fourth, is playful in a serious way, complex in a straightforward way, more culturally penetrating than a shelf of Don DeLillos and contains some of the fizziest prose of the year.”
London Review of Books, by Pankaj Mishra, 3/31/11
“Egan commemorates not only the fading of a cultural glory but also of the economic and political supremacy that underpinned it. The sense of an ending has always appeared to spur Egan’s inventiveness.”
The Irish Independent, 3/26/11
“A Visit from the Goon Squad is a tremendous novel: thoughtful, subtle, funny, wacky, energetic, profoundly authentic.”