The Heavenly Table

Reviews / Votes

The Heavenly Table is brilliant and unforgettable. In his trademark blend of humor and pathos, Donald Ray Pollock gives us a view into life's dark corners, without ever forgetting there is a lighter side as well -- Philipp Meyer * author of American Rust and The Son * Dark, violent and funny, this book will be like nothing else you've ever read * Evening Standard * There is something of the Coen Brothers in The Heavenly Table. This too is southern gothic... with a cast of grotesques, eccentric plot twists and humour of the blackest pitch... Pollock writes like an angel - an angel that has escaped from Knockemstiff lunatic asylum. * The Times * A tale of weird and darkly funny invention. * Sunday Times * A blood-laced tale of three brothers who rob and kill their way across the US. [The Heavenly Table] will be a book you won't be able to stop recommending once you've finished... A bit like reading Hunter S Thompson crossed with Cormac McCarthy - and a sprinkling of Nick Cave chucked in for brutal measure. It's the kind of book you just know the Coen Brothers are itching to adapt, with its vast array of quirky characters and black humour * ShortList * Donald Ray Pollock's brilliant Western is an earthy, raunchy read - Dickensian in its rogue's gallery of oddball characters. Full of black humour, it's superbly constructed and written with true grit. By the end, one is left longing for more and panting for the movie that will surely come -- John Harding * Daily Mail * Wild, rollicking, and wonderfully vulgar... A riotous satire that takes on our hopeless faith in modernity, along with our endless capacity for cruelty and absurd pretension. * New York Times * Truly fabulous... A very wry comedy... When reviewing, I usually mark down pages with particularly well-honed phrases: I stopped doing so when reading The Heavenly Table as I probably would have bookmarked every page...Witty and expansive... I am tempted to say that anyone wanting to understand contemporary America's political direction might be well advised to start with this novel. -- Stuart Kelly * Scotsman * A fine (and often very funny) multi-stranded yarn, set at the dawn of US involvement in WW1 with the nation on the cusp of modernity. As Tarantino's The Hateful Eight dared onscreen, The Heavenly Table lances the boil of modern America on the page. * The Skinny * Pollock's freewheeling, blood-spilling story is well matched by his prose. * Literary Review *