'A fantastic debut... A wonderfully ambitious novel about death, snakes and female revenge...recounted with a rich, hypnotic lyricism.'
-- The Sunday Times
'Loved this epic book - beautiful, brilliant, powerful, and shivery-back-of-the-neck terrifying.'
-- Madeline Miller, author of Circe
'A marvellous, confounding debut that moves from eerie Vietnamese forests to rundown zoos and crowded nightclubs... Kupersmith has been compared to David Mitchell for her novel's time-hopping characters and sweeping ambition. However, with its seam of delightfully lurid feminist body horror, the novel more closely recalls the fabulist world of Kelly Link, Intan Paramaditha and Mariana Enriquez... A hugely impressive debut.'
-- Guardian
'What a joy to return to the numinously spooky world of [Violet] Kupersmith and find the ghosts of history and family still haunting her pages. This impressively constructed weave of stories is gorgeous, completely original, and quite disturbing, usually all three at the same time. Beware! This book might swallow you up.'
-- Karen Joy Fowler, New York Times bestselling author of We Are All Completely Beside Ourselves
'Violet Kupersmith's Build Your House Around My Body weaves together Vietnamese folklore and ghosts into a visceral and brilliant read.'
-- Stylist
'Fiction as daring and accomplished as Violet Kupersmith's first novel reignites my love of the form and its kaleidoscopic possibilities.'
-- David Mitchell, author of Cloud Atlas
'Dazzling... I had the sense that Violet Kupersmith's eerie and electric debut novel was spreading beyond the bounds of the page and seeping into my life. That is this novel's power: It followed me into my days, refusing to release me... A thrilling read, acrobatic and filled with verve... Kupersmith is a brilliant technician of the small moment, the just-right observation. Her sensory language is at once bold and perfectly precise.'
-- New York Times
'I am loving Build Your House Around My Body... it's really difficult to believe this is a debut novel.'
-- Jen Campbell, author of The Beginning of the World in the Middle of the Night
'Build Your House Around My Body is such an innovative, brilliant, haunting and compelling read.'
-- Nguyen Phan Que Mai, author of The Mountains Sing
'A book a bit like the creatures within. It has fangs and claws. It horrifies and charms. It is the sort of book you force on your friends, just so you can talk to them about it.'
-- Rowan Hisayo Buchanan, author of Harmless Like You and Starling Days
'Violet Kupersmith has elevated the ghost story into an art form. Her intricately plotted, flamboyantly original novel is by turns steamy, grisly, comic, horrific, and touching. This literally haunting tale will stay with you long after the last page is turned.'
-- Valerie Martin, author of Property and I Give it to You
'Creepy, exciting, moving, insanely funny: a sweat-soaked reading delight. Careering through a host of snaking lives, eras, and beautifully drawn locations in Vietnam, Build Your House Around My Body is mesmerising. An absolute triumph of storytelling.'
-- Nick Bradley, author of The Cat and the City
'Kupersmith's assured debut...is a labyrinthine, shape-shifting novel, deep in magical realism territory. It is greatly to the author's credit that she makes this work and fully engages the reader's interest... Reminiscent of Gunter Grass's The Tin Drum and Salman Rushdie's Midnight's Children. It is a measure of Violet Kupersmith's achievement that Build Your House Around My Body can stand proudly in such exalted company.'
-- New Internationalist
