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Overview
"A hero with Huck Finn’s heart and charm, lighting by El Greco and jokes by Punch and Judy.... Riddley Walker is haunting and fiercely imagined and—this matters most—intensely ponderable." —Benjamin DeMott, The New York Times Book Review
"This is what literature is meant to be." —Anthony Burgess
"Russell Hoban has brought off an extraordinary feat of imagination and style.... The conviction and consistency are total. Funny, terrible, haunting and unsettling, this book is a masterpiece." —Anthony Thwaite, Observer
"Extraordinary... Suffused with melancholy and wonder, beautifully written, Riddley Walker is a novel that people will be reading for a long, long time." —Michael Dirda, Washington Post Book World
"Stunning, delicious, designed to prevent the modern reader from becoming stupid." —John Leonard, The New York Times
"Highly enjoyable... An intriguing plot... Ferociously inventive." —Walter Clemons, Newsweek
"Astounding... Hoban’s soaring flight of imagination is that golden rarity, a dazzlingly realized work of genius." —Jane Clapperton, Cosmopolitan
"An imaginative intensity that is rare in contemporary fiction.’ —Paul Gray, Time
Riddley Walker is a brilliant, unique, completely realized work of fiction. One reads it again and again, discovering new wonders every time through. Set in a remote future in a post-nuclear holocaust England (Inland), Hoban has imagined a humanity regressed to an iron-age, semi-literate state—and invented a language to represent it. Riddley is at once the Huck Finn and the Stephen Dedalus of his culture—rebel, change agent, and artist. Read again or for the first time this masterpiece of 20th-century literature with new material by the author.
Synopsis
"A hero with Huck Finn's heart and charm, lighting by El Greco and jokes by Punch and Judy.... Riddley Walker is haunting and fiercely imagined and — this matters most — intensely ponderable." — Benjamin DeMott, The New York Times Book Review
"This is what literature is meant to be." — Anthony Burgess
"Russell Hoban has brought off an extraordinary feat of imagination and style.... The conviction and consistency are total. Funny, terrible, haunting and unsettling, this book is a masterpiece." — Anthony Thwaite, Observer
"Extraordinary... Suffused with melancholy and wonder, beautifully written, Riddley Walker is a novel that people will be reading for a long, long time." — Michael Dirda, Washington Post Book World
"Stunning, delicious, designed to prevent the modern reader from becoming stupid." — John Leonard, The New York Times
"Highly enjoyable... An intriguing plot... Ferociously inventive." — Walter Clemons, Newsweek
"Astounding... Hoban's soaring flight of imagination is that golden rarity, a dazzlingly realized work of genius." — Jane Clapperton, Cosmopolitan
"An imaginative intensity that is rare in contemporary fiction.' — Paul Gray, Time
Riddley Walker is a brilliant, unique, completely realized work of fiction. One reads it again and again, discovering new wonders every time through. Set in a remote future in a post-nuclear holocaust England (Inland), Hoban has imagined a humanity regressed to an iron-age, semi-literate state — and invented a language to represent it. Riddley is at once the Huck Finn and the Stephen Dedalus of his culture — rebel, change agent, and artist. Read again or for the first time this masterpiece of 20th-century literature with new material by the author.
Anthony Thwaite
Russell Hoban has brought off an extraordinay feat of imagination and style. . . . The conviction and consistency are total. Funny, terrible, haunting and unsettling, this book is a masterpiece. -- Observer
Editorials
Nuvo "Off the Shelf
Russell Hoban's 'Riddley Walker' is that rare novel that can be loved by doomster geeks and literary readers alike. It's narrated in a language burnt to its rudiments by nuclear holocaust and revived into new forms by survivors in England who live as hunters, and who believe in a past that's half history, half myth.—Michael Helm, Nuvo "Off the Shelf", Summer 2008— Michael Helm
Nuvo "Off the Shelf"
"Russell Hoban's 'Riddley Walker' is that rare novel that can be loved by doomster geeks and literary readers alike. It's narrated in a language burnt to its rudiments by nuclear holocaust and revived into new forms by survivors in England who live as hunters, and who believe in a past that's half history, half myth." —Michael Helm, Nuvo "Off the Shelf", Summer 2008— Michael Helm