The Appointment

Reviews / Votes

A brooding, fog-shrouded allegory of life under the long oppression of the regime of Nicolae Ceausescu. * New York Times * Nobody since Arthur Koestler in the 1940s has written more intelligently or with such subtle precision about life under totalitarianism ... Mueller has an exceptionally rare talent - to turn the terrifying, the distorted and the hideously ugly into something uplifting and beautiful * Prospect * Herta Muller is a passionate artist of protest. -- Eileen Battersby * Irish Times * A strange, lyrical and disturbing allegory of life in Ceausescu's Romania. -- Hari Kunzru * Observer Books of the Year * A tour de force in storytelling, which manages to turn the barest of prose into poetry ... Expertly translated by Michael Hulse and Philip Boehm, it is a chilling story, exquisitely told * Independent * The Appointment is both a pleasure to read and horrifying. Written with painful clarity, it is seductively conversational, yet every sentence demands attention ... The control of ideas and pace in a novel that still allows rolling emotion behind every line is remarkable. * Herald * A slim, masterfully written tale. * Newsweek * Mueller achieves something beautiful. She has wrested poetry from one woman's desire to remain human in an inhuman system. * Newsday * A taut and brilliant book. * Chicago Tribune * Mueller scatters narrative bombshells across a field of dreams. * San Francisco Chronicle *