'A beautifully detailed story, perhaps the finest jazz novel ever written'

Sunday Times

'The downtown world of bars, whores, streetlife bursting with music is evoked so vividly, so pungently you seem to breathe in the atmosphere ... I haven't been so excited by a new writer for a long time'

Time Out

'Not only the best jazz novel ever written, but one of the best novels of any kind published in English in the last ten years'

The Musician

'Michael Ondaatje is a novelist with the heart of a poet'

Chicago Tribune