A Luminous Republic

Reviews / Votes

A Luminous Republic has all the stark power of a folk-tale or a fable. It also raises concerns that are pressing and contemporary-about the function and source of language, about public paranoia and hysteria, about the idea of community and how information spreads. At the book's center is a moving personal story about memory and loss. The narrative is engaging, at times playful, wholly compelling -- Colm Toibin At first you will feel fear, but what you feel next is something much deeper, disturbing and luminous -- Samanta Schweblin Disquieting without tricks and beautiful without artifice, A Luminous Republic is an engrossing tale of unusual moral precision... A triumph -- Juan Gabriel Vasquez A wicked fable on childhood that is also a suspense novel... Highly enjoyable and profound -- Juan Pablo Villalobos Barba conjures the primal impulses of childhood with terrifying precision. In its questioning of violence as both threat and seduction, A Luminous Republic is both a rapturous fable and a ruinous forecast of the havoc that comes from civic inaction -- Idra Novey, author of * Those Who Knew and Ways to Disappear * A fever dream of a novel with sharp-as-knives insights; deft and cutting -- Lauren Beukes, author of * The Shining Girls * One of the best books I've ever read...There is an air of magic, black and white, lingering around every page of this epic novel of 192 pages, like gun smoke after a shootout. I say 'epic' because it feels as full, as dense with duration, as if it were 1,000 pages long, but can be read in an evening...This is a book at once heavy and light, Caliban and Ariel, somber and comic. It will open your eyes -- Edmund White A terrifying masterpiece. To lay bare with such stunning precision the nature of self-obsession - the viciousness with which any one of us might respond to that which we don't understand - marks Andres Barba as a writer of extraordinary talent. He has created a small, simple story and within it buried immense complexity and truth -- Omar El Akkad, bestselling author of * American War * A narrator with a flair for philosophical digression recounts a tale of savagery and fear... As a parable of the loss of faith in the "religion of childhood" and the fetish of childish innocence, A Luminous Republic would be satisfying enough. But Barba also manages to conjure a denouement (faint intimations of which are seeded throughout the book) that the novelist Edmund White describes in his foreword, with some justification, as "transcendent and beautiful" * Financial Times * Barba stokes up a tension as thick as the jungle encroaching on the town's edges * Irish Times * [A Luminous Republic] reads like a sinister fairy tale, resonating with the power of an ancient myth, a darkness looming behind the exquisitely translated prose.... a profoundly moving tale of memory and grief * Irish Times * Barba's denouement still grips with the power of a thriller * TLS *