The Absolute Book

Praise

Praise for Elizabeth Knox and The Absolute Book

“Every once in a while, as a reader, you run into one of those books that is just too big for your mind to entirely take in. . . . It’s quite bracing to come up against the hard edge of your own imagination as you try to pursue a visionary author through the limitless expanse of hers. This is all to say that the experience of reading the New Zealand writer Elizabeth Knox’s contemporary fantasy novel The Absolute Book reminded me of how I felt reading Jonathan Strange and Mr. Norrell or The Left Hand of Darkness or His Dark Materials or, to move out of genre, Life After Life or The Underground Railroad. I felt that my position in relation to the book’s capacious intellect and imagination and moral purpose was a vertiginous one. It was thrilling and frightening.”
—Dan Kois, Slate

“I love all of Elizabeth Knox’s books.”
—Kelly Link

“Explosive and surprising . . . quite brilliant.”
—The Spinoff (NZ)

“The Absolute Book‘s power is in the skill and pace of Knox’s storytelling, the perfect spinning of the intricate plot, the sharp dialogue and luminous evocation of place. Knox’s landscapes are vivid and beautiful, both the earthly and the otherworldly. I was carried along without objection, and the great pleasure for me, along with the simple one of wanting to know what would happen next, was the feeling that my realist mind had been flattened out – that I had, temporarily, due to the intensity and momentum of the narrative, made some kind of mental shift, lost the compulsion to search for psychological depth (always a source of disquiet) and gone back to an earlier imaginative state, one that pulsed with mysterious possibility.” 
—Charlotte Grimshaw, Noted (NZ)

“An angelic book, an apocalyptic book, an astounding book.” 
—Francis Spufford, author of Golden Hill

“The master is present. To read Knox on such a huge canvas—to be immersed in her worlds, wrapped in her intelligence and craft so completely—is an experience not be missed. Lessing, Le Guin, Knox—books where the best hearts meet the best minds meet the best imaginations are few and far between. The Absolute Book is a triumph of fantasy grounded in the reality and challenges of the moment we live in.” 
—Pip Adam

“Elizabeth Knox has the most original and lateral literary mind in New Zealand.” 
—Metro

“Knox is a writer with a gift for describing the colour of the present moment. . . . She lets her language breathe, lets it speak in revelations rather than explanations.” 
—Times Literary Supplement