The Crying of Lot 49

The best American novel I have read since the war
For the reader who has yet to make acquaintance with this important comic talent. . . an appropriate introduction...defiantly, purposefully outrageous * Spectator *
The Crying of Lot 49 contains some of the most elegiac writing about America since Fitzgerald, as well as packing an intense metaphorical punch about revelation, hierophany, meaning and connection that is far too complex to reduce to precis * Observer *
The narrator sounds like a survivor looking through the massed wreckage of his civilization, 'a salad of despair'. That image, to suggest but one of the puns in the word Tristero, is typically full of sadness, terror, love, and flamboyance. But then, how else should one imagine a tryst with America? And that is what this novel is. * New York Times *
A book of thundering originality and depth and lyricism, a book with the highest intellectual aspirations - and yet it also seemed to be concerned with creating genuine suspense -- Ned Beauman * Independent *