A sprawling tale of achievement, yearning, pride, and human weakness ... A multi-layered work that recalls the tragicomic realism of Saul Bellow and John Updike * Publishers Weekly *
A virtuoso storyteller and a connoisseur of hubris, Boyle mesmerizes and provokes ... Boyle is a literary star ... Shrewd and irresistible novel of ambition and folly * Booklist *
One of Boyle's best - and quite possibly one of the best of the year * Library Journal *
T. C. Boyle is by far and away one of the most inventive, adventurous and accomplished fiction writers in the US today ... Most of all, he is a mesmerising storyteller -- Lionel Shriver
Boyle is a writer who chooses a large canvas and fills it to the edges -- Barbara Kingsolver
A virtuoso craftsman -- Annie Proulx
A sort of Frank Zappa of American letters ... Boyle is incapable of writing a boring sentence * Financial Times *
Like the brilliant Karl Ove Knausgaard, he can make the cooking of a pork chop so exciting that you find yourself on the edge of your seat ... a master * The Times *
Imagine an earthbound Interstellar with a touch of I'm a Celebrity * GQ Magazine *
One of our finest chroniclers of the American west, a landscape sometimes unspoiled but frequently scarred ... He describes the high desert of Arizona in the midst of winter ... He uses such language sparingly, to remind his readers and his characters what they are always on the verge of squandering ... He relies on a plangent sense of humour * Independent *
Based on a real-life experiment The Terranauts by TC Boyle is the tale of a would-be utopia that is threatened by human -- Christmas Pick of the Month * Choice Magazine *
My reading year began and almost-ends with T C Boyle. Taut and revelatory, his novel The Harder They Come deals with gun violence, anti-authoritarianism and environmental issues. His latest, The Terranauts, has just come out. It's an engrossing take on the Biosphere II experiment in the 1990s. If you don't know Boyle's work, you're in for a treat -- Regi Claire * Herald *
Why Biosphere 2 would have exerted a magnetic force on Boyle isn't hard to see. In his 15 previous novels he has shown a deep and abiding interest in messy utopias; ecological fervour; grandiose guru figures; isolated, stranded lives; and, more generally, in ideas so overinflated that their only fate is to pop...Boyle drapes his novel with enough Christian symbolism - the project's founder, Jeremiah Reed, is called G.C., for God the Creator; his full time aide and part-time lover Judy Forester is known as Judas; of Ramsay, Linda says, "he's the serpent"; and late in the novel we meet an integral character named Eve - to suggest, or at least nod toward, a pious allegory: the Augustinian notion that libido was what spoiled the Garden of Eden, just as, in a sense, it makes a big hot mess of the E2 mission. But Boyle is too agile and feisty a thinker to hew to this line. The search for Eden (or any utopia) is essentially comic because every vision of Eden is a private fantasy, a finger-print of desires. Humanity, for Boyle, never suffered a fall; we've always been this petty and cutthroat and grubby and absurd. And as The Terranauts makes clear, wherever we go - so long as we're trapped together, in this atmosphere or any other - we always will be -- Jonathan Miles * International New York Times *
