praise
A New York Times Notable Book • One of the ten top novels of the year —Time and NPR
NAMED A BEST BOOK ON MORE THAN TWENTY END-OF-THE-YEAR LISTS, INCLUDING The New Yorker • The Atlantic • The Economist • Newsweek/The Daily Beast • The New Republic • New York Daily News • Los Angeles Times • The Boston Globe • The Seattle Times • Minneapolis Star Tribune • GQ • Salon • Slate • New York magazine • The Week • The Kansas City Star • Kirkus Reviews
Winner of the PEN/Hemingway Award, the New York City Book Award, and the Rosenthal Award of the American Academy of Arts and Letters.
Finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award, the NYPL Young Lions Award, and the Ondaatje Prize of the Royal Society of Literature.
“An indelible novel. Does precisely what literature should do: it brings together thoughts and beliefs, and blurs borders…A compassionate and masterly work.”
“Beautiful, subtle, and finally, original…What moves the prose forward is the prose—the desire to write, to defeat solitude by writing. Cole has made his novel as close to a diary as a novel can get, with room for reflection, autobiography, stasis, and repetition. This is extremely difficult, and many accomplished novelists would botch it, since a sure hand is needed to make the writer’s careful stitching look like a thread merely being followed for its own sake. Mysteriously, wonderfully, Cole does not botch it.”
“Magnificent and shattering. A remarkably resonant feat of prose.”
“A clear-eyed and mysterious achievement, a modern meditation that is both complex and utterly simple…In the precision with which Mr Cole chooses words or phrases he is not unlike Gustave Flaubert.”
“A complicated portrait of a narrator whose silences speak as loudly as his words—all articulated in an effortlessly elegant prose…Teju Cole has achieved, in this book, a rare balance. He captures life’s urgent banality, and he captures, too, the ways in which the greater subjects glimmer darkly in the interstices.”
—Claire Messud, The New York Review of Books
“The most thoughtful and provocative debut I’ve read in a long time. The best first novel of 2011.”
“Masterful.”
—Kirkus (starred review)
“Intelligent and panoramic…engaged with the world in a rare and refreshing way.”
—Publishers Weekly (starred review)
“Open City is a meditation on history and culture, identity and solitude. The soft, exquisite rhythms of its prose, the display of sensibility, the lucid intelligence, make it a novel to savour and treasure.”
—Colm Tóibín, author of The Master and Brooklyn
“The pages of Open City unfold with the tempo of a profound, contemplative walk through layers of histories and their posthumous excavations. The juxtaposition of encounters, seen through the eyes of a knowing flâneur, surface and then dissolve like a palimpsest composed, outside of time, by a brilliant master.”
—Rawi Hage, author of De Niro’s Game, winner of the International IMPAC Dublin Literary Award
“A gorgeous, crystalline, and cumulative investigation of memory, identity, and erasure. It gathers its power inexorably, page by page, and ultimately reveals itself as nothing less than a searing tour de force. Teju Cole might just be a W. G. Sebald for the twenty-first century.”
—Anthony Doerr, author of The Shell Collector
“Open City has traces of Mrs Dalloway, touches of Dave Eggers, but it’s 100% Teju Cole. A phenomenal voice, beautiful language.”
—The Takeaway, National Public Radio
“One of the most intriguing novels you’ll likely read…the alienated but sophisticated viewpoint is oddly poignant and compelling…reads like Camus’s L’etranger.”
—Library Journal
