Chosen as a Best Book of Summer 2019 by
the Guardian, Financial Times, Evening Standard, Daily Telegraph,
Esquire, TIME, BookRiot and Philadelphia Inquirer
“His most daring project yet… The book begins urgently, tragically, in the incantatory language of a fairy tale told and retold over time… Haddon’s writing is beautiful, almost hallucinatory at times, and his descriptions so rich and lush and specific that smells and sights and tastes and sounds…all but waft and dance off the page… The Porpoise is a provocative and deeply interesting work.”
– The New York Times
“Deliciously cinematic… Quick recalibrations—from contemporary realism to suspense to epic—convey bravura, a giddy sense of possibility, a love of story… This bleeding together of character arcs and images gives the book a strange capaciousness. It results in some dizzyingly original moments, in which the multiple iterations of the narrator shimmer around each other.”
– Katy Waldman, The New Yorker
“It’s a testament to Haddon’s prodigious gifts as a storyteller that this strange, epic adventure is so compulsively readable.”
– TIME
“The Porpoise is so riveting that I found myself constantly pining to fall back into its labyrinth of swashbuckling adventure and feminist resistance… A sleek voyage of gripping tribulation…Fantastic…Electrifying… A brilliant blending of realism and mythology, a poignant acknowledgement of the limits of female power — and its boundless potential…A novel just as thrilling as it is thoughtful.”
– Washington Post
“The best novel this side of the 20th century.”
– Minneapolis Star Tribune
“Elegant and full of vivid descriptions … The Porpoise is a rich, beautiful read.”
“A fantastical story that mirrors Greek mythology to explore the theme of female agency.”
– USA Today
“A fantastical yarn … Haddon is a writer of acute precision.”
– The Boston Globe
“Weaves past and present, suffering and Shakespeare, all caught in the network of human lives.”
– The Philadelphia Inquirer