Broken River: The most suspense-filled, inventive thriller you’ll read this year - Tapa dura

Compelling from the first page, and then smart, sophisticated, suspenseful and satisfying throughout -- Broken River is a first-class ride. (Lee Child)

J. Robert Lennon is a connoisseur of calamity, qualms and paradox, all of which are on profuse display in his crafty, seductive eighth novel, Broken River... Broken River is a remarkable performance, a magic trick that makes you laugh at its audacity. Lennon has written a realistic novel with vivid characters and flashes of humour and an evocative mood... when you close a novel as good as Broken River, something, not quite a ghost, may follow you. (Terrence Rafferty New York Times)

A cracker of a novel - sharp, dark and suspenseful (Hephzibah Anderson Mail on Sunday)

What prevents Broken River from being classified as simply a horror or crime story are Lennon's linguistic energy and dark humour ... it's a rare book that manages to bend genres so successfully - that thrills and frightens while evoking such insight into human failings and the lure of the past (Zoe Apostolides Financial Times)

Fizzing with line-by-line propulsion and wickedly plotted with slow-burn complexity, this is a knockout, unmissable performance from a writer at the very top of his game. (Observer)

Broken River is like a Coen brothers movie set in rural New England... Lennon has a lot of fun... and we do, too. (Sunday Times)

A writer with enough electricity to light up the country. (Ann Patchett)

Hypnotic and unsettling, Broken River weaves a dark, compelling spell (Mick Herron, author of Real Tigers)

Lennon's prose has a languorous, lingering quality with shifts of perspective and tonal jolts that make you concentrate all the harder. I might venture that Broken River ought to be on prize longlists, but as with the house, nothing is certain... There is a ghastly creepiness to all this, magnified by the cat-like elegance of the prose... Two thirds of the way through this novel, I fantasised about an epic Mexican shootout where Wes Anderson, Guy Maddin, Sofia Coppola, David Lynch and Kevin Smith argued about who should get the film rights. At the same time, I realised it is impossible to film. So much happens inside the characters: so much is presented as hypothetical. This is an astonishing, nasty, brilliant, upsetting work. (Guardian)

J Robert Lennon's tautly constructed blend of literary fiction and thriller is a compelling cocktail, right down to its explosive and shocking ending (John Harding Daily Mail)

J. Robert Lennon is the author of eight novels, including Familiar, Castle and Mailman, and two story collections, Pieces for the Left Hand and See You in Paradise. His fiction has appeared in the Paris Review, Granta, Harper's, Playboy, and the New Yorker. He lives in Ithaca, New York, where he teaches writing at Cornell University.