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by Peter Hoeg
Set in Denmark in the here and now, The Quiet Girl centers around Kaspar Krone, a world-renowned circus clown with a deep love for the music of Johann Sebastian Bach, and an even deeper gambling debt. Wanted for tax evasion and on the verge of extradition, Krone is drafted into the service of a mysterious order of nuns who promise him reprieve from the international authorities in return for his help safeguarding a group of children with mystical abilities—abilities that Krone shares. When one of the children goes missing, Krone sets off to find the young girl and bring her back, making a shocking series of discoveries along the way about her identity and the true intentions of his young wards. The result is a fast-paced, philosophical thriller blending social realism with the literary fantastic and pitting art and spirituality against corporate interests and nothing less than the will to war by the industrialized world. The Quiet Girl is a masterful, inventive novel that marks the triumphal return of one of the great writers of the international literary world.
"The blend of science, erudition and slow revelations could only have been written by Høeg, and will appeal to his many fans and other readers with a taste for the literary offbeat." - Publishers Weekly.
"As the novel reaches its satisfying denouement, readers will appreciate that a master has not lost his sense of timing. Strongly recommended for all fiction collections." - Library Journal.
"Hoeg returns with another demanding, often befuddling, but unquestionably daring philosophical novel ....Some readers may conclude that the novel spins out of control, untethered to any form of reality, but even they will respect Hoeg's genius for stretching the bounds of narrative fiction in altogether new directions." - Booklist.
This information about The Quiet Girl was first featured
in "The BookBrowse Review" - BookBrowse's membership magazine, and in our weekly "Publishing This Week" newsletter. Publication information is for the USA, and (unless stated otherwise) represents the first print edition. The reviews are necessarily limited to those that were available to us ahead of publication. If you are the publisher or author and feel that they do not properly reflect the range of media opinion now available, send us a message with the mainstream reviews that you would like to see added.
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This is the first novel in more than a decade from the internationally acclaimed, bestselling author of Smilla's Sense of Snow which The New Yorker described as having "prose that is both changeable and deep-fathomed as poetry . . . [it] demands to be read aloud and savored."
Although the prepublication media reviews for The Quiet Girl have been generally favorable, the BookBrowse member reviews have been quite mixed, indicating that this is a book you're likely to either love or hate. Read the reviews to help you decide which side you're likely to come down on!
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