The Arrest

The thing about the best Lethem novels - and I'm thinking back to early in his career, to Motherless Brooklyn and The Fortress of Solitude - is that they were such fun. I've read everything he's written since and rarely has a novel approached the sheer pleasure of The Arrest... It is, in short, a blast. * Observer *
Exuberantly clever... extremely strange, twistily plotted, fizzingly written, not a little absurd and lingeringly mysterious. * Daily Telegraph *
Lethem's pithy chapters - some poetic, some sharp, others both - bring this eerily timely tale to a grim, if wry, conclusion. * Daily Mail *
Inventive, entertaining and superbly written * New York Times *
A certain goofy charm... Jonathan Lethem's apocalypse is a whimsical one. * The Times *
An impeccably executed, moving, and wildly inventive tale of madness and narrative at the end of the world. Lethem is at the top of his game. * Emily St. John Mandel, author of STATION ELEVEN *
A pleasingly idiosyncratic take on things falling apart * SFX *
If part of the point of The Arrest is that we love our apocalypses neatly packaged, then Lethem deserves credit for refusing to play along: his inimitable imagination never stops delivering curveballs. * Daily Mail *
Jonathan Lethem's latest novel, "The Arrest," is a work of literary fiction that associates itself with the science fiction subculture by launching a carefully planned assault on the science fiction pop-culture juggernaut. In doing so, the book provides a quietly lyrical alternative to the uberviolence and cliché blustering of Hollywood plots. * Boston Globe *
The Arrest is a novel that defies description in the best possible way, which makes it quintessentially a work of Jonathan Lethem's at his most sublime. It's an organic tale of the apocalypse, a Hollywood parable, and a fable of survival and surrender. The prose crackles, the jokes land hard and fast, and the story's heart is sensationally large. Spectacularly imaginative but grounded in humanity and hope - The Arrest is a perfect novel for this moment and future ones. * Ivy Pochoda, author of These Women *
It's a wonderful read, the writing gracefully gonzo, the emotional beats often unexpected yet quite right. * Los Angeles Times *
As a writer gifted at playing with genre forms and riffing on popular culture, (Lethem) enjoys tweaking dystopian-novel conventions. * USA TODAY *
Sentence by sentence, Lethem is sheer visual delight. * Financial Times *
The Arrest is a very wry, very smart novel - every wink and twist is pre-empted. For all the genre shenanigans it has a proper purpose. * Stuart Kelly, Spectator *