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Review ------ The energy, the hairpin turns, the narrative ces, the stomach churning ascents and ted taboos: what a joy to surrender oneself to a writer of such prodigious talent. (Peter Carey, twice Man Booker Prize-winner) The funniest novel I've read in the last 12 months . . . Genuinely moving. (The Times) Quicksand is, if anything, even more hysterically funny [than A Fraction of the Whole] and quite, quite horrific . . . Linguistically, Toltz manages to find the perfect if unlikely word or phrase faultlessly. It is very rare for me to laugh on almost every page of a book; it is even rarer for that to be accompanied by exquisite melancholy. Toltz is writing like very few other authors: he seems like an Antipodean Thomas Bernhard in his unsparing, agonising comedies. I hope it is not seven years until his next novel. (Stuart Kelly, Scotland on Sunday) Toltz is clearly talented, with a vivid satirical intelligence... tremendous. (The Sunday Times) Leaves you almost breathless. There is more heart, and joy and compassion and hard-earned wisdom in Quicksand than seems possible for a single novel; it is life, literature at its fullest. (Dinaw Mengestu, winner of the Guardian First Book Award) A book through with mordant humour and sizzling inventiveness.... In Aldo, Toltz has created a magnificent character. (Financial Times) A relentlessly garrulous tragicomic saga about friendship, failure, creativity and endurance that is both brilliant and exhausting... Even in a book overflowing with solipsists and monomaniacs, would-be artists and theories about art, it remains a creative force to be reckoned with. (Guardian) Highly original, entertaining and almost impossible to summarize, this is a high-octane, adrenaline-fuelled, frenetic tour de force of sustained brilliance. There is with, laugh-out-loud humour and linguistic dexterity on almost every page. (Mail on Sunday) Toltz is incapable of writing a dull sentence. (Daily Mail) If anything can go wrong, it will - and it inevitably does so in the vicinity of Aldo Benjamin, Quicksand's luckless protagonist. Toltz's first novel, A Fraction of the Whole, was shortlisted for the Booker in 2008; his funny, dark, formidable follow-up is a garrulous meditation on e, religion and male misbehaviour. (Financial Times) Book Description ---------------- Dazzling, hilarious, disturbing and utterly unforgettable new novel from the author of the Man Booker-shortlisted A Fraction of the Whole.