The Romantics

The Romantics looks to Flaubert's Sentimental Education, to E.M. Forster, to Turgenev. But it is the product of a distinctive and sharp intelligence -- Hilary Mantel
A sensitive and introspective novel . . . a meditation on hope and failure. Mishra's evocations of Indian landscape and customs are vivid and thoughtful; his prose clean and unhampered and his descriptive passages to be savoured * Guardian *
Contemporary India is brought to vigorous, thrumming life in the pages of The Romantics * Sunday Times *
If you buy one literary novel this year, make sure it's this -- Amanda Craig * The Times *
This bright new star is the real thing -- David Robson * Sunday Telegraph *
[A]n intriguing combination of casual grace and emotional intensity, peppered with discreet social comment on caste, class, sectarian strife, the state of the nation . . . a charming debut * The Independent *
A work of art, a first novel of the highest achievement...a writer whose work will last. Read it and find yourself at the source of something great -- Candia McWilliam * Financial Times *
A first novel of astonishing maturity * Daily Telegraph *
[An] extraordinary debut novel . . . a supernova * The Washington Post *
Mishra's lyrical descriptions . . . and the depth of culture the region offers, is a haunting reminder of India's power to bewitch * Time Out *
Grip[s] the reader as artfully and as compellingly as the first page of A Passage to India * The New York Review of Books *
If much of cosmopolitan Indian writing has valorized the immigrant and the foreign land, then The Romantics is a celebration of the home and its forgotten world -- Amitava Kumar * The Nation *
A voice that fuses the lapidary precision of Flaubert with the meditative lyricism of Waugh's Brideshead Revisited, a voice that's alternately wry and ruminative, meticulous and expansive -- Michiko Kakutani * New York Times *
Many treasures in this brilliant novel -- Elizabeth Hardwick
Pankaj Mishra writes the most perfect prose of any Indian novelist of his generation -- William Dalrymple
Mishra's eye is sharp, his prose flawless * Time *
[A] surprisingly assured, provocatively balanced meditation on the familiar culture flash * Boston Globe *
A truly ambitious attempt to compare the way people in the East and the West dream . . . Delicate and subtly tantalising in the way only a book can really be * Vogue *
It is almost as if when everyone is flashing De Beers diamonds, Mishra traps the quiet luminescence of the moonstone in his theme and style * The Hindu *
Mishra's writing has a lovely potency . . . subtly layered and compelling * Times Literary Supplement *
Impressive . . . The Romantics turns its back on the exotic richness and the "teeming" panoramic quality which we readily assume to be expressive of Indianness itself * Sydney Morning Herald *
A first novel whose achievement is something that most writers could be proud of at any stage in their careers * Vancouver Sun *