‘Yes, the new year’s just beginning, but it’s hard to imagine a better novel bein g published in the months to come than Zoli. Colum McCann has not only imagined Romany culture in Eastern Europe from the 1930s to the twenty-first century, with its storytellers, tinsmiths, horse thieves, and musicians, its caravans and harps; he’s also imagined the charnel houses and bone fields of fetishistic fascism, barbed wire flying “little flags of skin” and slippers made of hair.’ - John Leonard, Harper’s Magazine (click here for more from this review)
‘The Irish writer Colum McCann is blessed with the unlikely mix of an adventurer's spirit and an introvert's compassionate eye. His fiction reflects this sweet incongruity, roaming among life's dispossessed with heartfelt ease...Zoli is a commanding novel with an inner reality so authentic it could only have come from the matrix of a novelist's imagination. But its bounty of emotional and character detail is tethered by McCann's research’ - Gail Caldwell, Boston Globe (click here for more from this review)
‘...pitch-perfect control of character and narrative. I don't know whether McCann's account of Gypsy life is true, but I was more than happy to be convinced by the dense cascade of fiercely memorable smells, sounds and visual images. His novel is a hymn to specificity, a clamour against homogenization...’ - Richard Eyre, The Guardian (UK) (click here for more from this review)
‘...a beautifully written novel...so convincingly, quietly passionate that one can only imagine how [McCann] immersed himself in Roma culture while inventing a story of love and betrayal, exile and survival. Beautifully conceived, wonderfully told, the story is proof of an indomitable spirit.’ - Frances Itani, The Washington Post (click here for more from this review)
‘Zoli is McCann's fourth novel, and it is as assured as anything he has ever written, rich in vivid detail but wise, too, about the cruelty of the world. And his prose is just plain gorgeous, even when depicting the simplest of circumstances....What is even more remarkable is the way McCann allows us to enter a world few of us know anything about.’ - June Sawyers, San Francisco Chronicle (click here for more from this review)
‘After fascists in pre-World War II Slovakia drown most her Gypsy family, Zoli, 6, escapes with her grandfather. He sparks her love of language, and she grows up writing about her people (who regard reading and writing as taboo). But when the Communists champion her work as part of their effort to relocate the Gypsy (or Roma) people, her community rejects her. With a poet’s language, McCann creates a haunting story about the pain of exile.’ - Porter Shreve, People Magazine
‘Based loosely on the true story of Gypsy poet Papusza, Colum McCann's lyrical fourth novel is as rich and sensuous as loamy, freshly turned soil. The titular character begins her narration just as the Hlinkas — a brutal paramilitary force in pre-WWII Czechoslovakia — have killed both her parents and siblings. Thanks to her Das Kapital-toting grandfather, however, 6-year-old Zoli soon learns to read and write, and eventually becomes a singer and a poet acclaimed by the wider world — a world that includes a non-Gypsy love, passionate English expat Stephen Swann. McCann's research and lustrous prose bring Zoli vibrantly alive.’ - Leah Greenblatt, Entertainment Weekly
‘If a writer's highest calling is to imagine what it is to be “other”, then Colum McCann is a giant amongst us - fearless, huge-hearted, a poet with every living breath’ - Peter Carey, two-time Booker Prize-winning author of True History of the Kelly Gang and Theft
‘A great book and a marvellously crafted story. I loved the different angles, the images and the depiction of the Roma. This is life without being sentimental or defensive’ - Roddy Doyle, Booker Prize-winning author of Paddy Clarke Ha Ha Ha
'Zoli is an assiduously crafted and beautifully haunting story of Europe from one of Ireland's very best novelists. Every book from Colum McCann extends his range and excavates new territories. He is an audacious and wonderfully skilled writer' - Joseph O’Connor, author of The Star of the Sea and Redemption
‘I review a great many Roma-themed manuscripts for publishers, but none has ever moved me as profoundly as the haunting story of Zoli. With its stark imagery it takes one deep into the heart of World War II Europe’ - Ian Hancock, Director of the Romani Archives and Documentation Center, University of Texas
'McCann is as fine, and persuasive, a storyteller as any other working in English today...Much more could be said about the beauty and subtle judgement of this, McCann's finest novel, but what emerges most powerfully is a sense of compassion, even identification, with a people, who, because of the stories told about them, only need appear on a country road to inspire hatred and fear from their fellow man.' - John Burnside, The Scotsman, (click here for more from this review)
'McCann has created possibly his most memorable character in Zoli, and brilliantly captured the physical and intellectual turmoil of those years in this superbly written and deeply affecting book. Moving backwards and forwards in time, it is perpetually challenging and conjures extraordinarily vivid images on almost every page. Zoli is a novel to get lost in.' - Dermot Bolger, Sunday Independent (Ireland)
'McCann intelligently poses complicated questions about immigration and identity that are deeply relevant today. His prose is sharp and scintillatingly sensual, and the final moment in which Zoli finally rediscovers herself is incontrovertibly moving...[a] beautiful, thoughtful novel' - Independent on Sunday (England), (click here for more from this review)
'[A] parable of love, betrayal and loss on a European scale...In an epigram to his previous bestselling novel Dancer, McCann quotes William Maxwell, who that "in talking about the past we lie with every breath we draw". But the force of McCann's language is so convincing that these "lies" are melded into a compelling parable that in the end brings hope as Zoli begins to sing again.' Lucinda Byatt, Scotland on Sunday
‘McCann’s strongest suit is his brilliant ability to recreate a remote world and era’ - Daily Mail
'There is great warmth in the novel, sparked by the author's genuine sense of commitment to this woman in both her actual and fictional forms. The story of Zoli deserves to be told, and with his gift for unpicking the seams of history, McCann brings to the fore its sad keynotes of manipulation and betrayal.' - Irish Times
'McCann has immersed himself in gypsy history and poetry, so that we get an extraordinary insight into the gypsy mind and philosophy of Zoli...The book is graphic about the persecution of the Roma, but makes no attempt to sentimentalise them. McCann has produced a deeply moving book that will possibly change your view of the world.' - Irish Mail
‘A haunting and lyrical story’ - The (London) Times
‘This beautifully written, heartfelt book is both compelling and moving from start to finish; a true page-turner that is unafraid to face the darker sides of life while evoking the joys and kindnesses that surprise and sustain us all’ - Waterstones Quarterly
' … a delicately crafted story...This extraordinary tale of gritty and poignant survival, told in multiple voices, is carried in McCann's crystalline, action-packed style.' - Sunday Times (London)
‘An unblinking meditation on the significance, value and challenge of cultural diversity… McCann’s novel is a rare feat’ - Irish Independent, (click here for more from this review)
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