Echoland

Reviews / Votes

A compelling mix of fable with the day-to-day account of a working-class boy... It is hard to think of a novel that so precisely and vividly conveys the pain and disorientation of puberty -- John Burnside * Guardian * Is there a living writer better at conveying the disconcerting relationship between time and memory?... There is pleasure, too, in watching Petterson shift through the gears from pleasure to unease in one of those gloriously sinuous sentences that have become something of a trademark -- Adrian Turpin * Financial Times * Petterson is remarkably gifted -- James Wood * New Yorker * It packs a powerful punch... A clear-cut jewel of nameless dread and nagging anxiety: Scandinavian gloom par excellence. -- Andrew Van Loon * Sunday Telegraph * His eerily terse prose luxuriates in the hazy strangeness of the Danish landscape and is particularly brilliant at nailing adolescence as an inchoate, restless state in which life is felt much more fiercely than it is understood. -- Claire Allfree * Mail on Sunday * Like an old photograph, it illuminates everything to a sudden point of clarity... Petterson's writing is so evocative of life on the cusp of becoming a teenager that when I close the book, I go back to the beginning and I re-read... Echoland is a novel that tastes of the sea and the sun and of frightening and beautiful thunderstorms. * Bookmunch *