“Reminiscent of the works of W.G. Sebald, this dreamy, incantatory debut was the most beautiful novel I read this year—the kind of book that remains on your nightstand long after you finish so that you can continue dipping in occasionally as a nighttime consolation.”—Ruth Franklin, The New Republic
“A psychological hand grenade.”—Alexis Madrigal, The Atlantic, Best Books I Read This Year
“A meditative and startlingly clear-eyed first novel.”—Newsweek/Daily Beast Writers’ Favorite Books 2011
“On the surface, the story of a young, foreign psychiatry resident in post-9/11 New York City who searches for the soul of the city by losing himself in extended strolls around teeming Manhattan. But it's really a story about a lost nation struggling to regain a sense of direction after that shattering, disorienting day 10 years ago. A quiet, lyrical and profound piece of writing.”—Seattle Times, 32 of the Year’s Best Books
“[Open City is] lean and mean and bristles with intelligence. The multi-culti characters and streets of New York are sharply observed and feel just right. . . . Toward the end, there’s a poignant, unexpected scene in a tailor’s shop that’s an absolute knockout.”—Jessica Hagedorn, author of Toxicology
“I couldn't stop reading Teju Cole's debut novel and was blown away by his ability to capture the human psyche with such beautiful yet subtle prose.”—Salon, Best Books of 2011
“An unusual accomplishment, Open City is a precise and poetic meditation on love, race, identity, friendship, memory, dislocation and Manhattan bird life.”—The Economist, 2011 Books of the Year
“The most interesting new writer I encountered this year.”—Books and Culture, Favorite Books of 2011
“A Sebaldesque wander through New York."—The Guardian, Best Books of the Year
“An indelible debut novel. Does precisely what literature should do: it brings together thoughts and beliefs, and blurs borders. . . . A compassionate and masterly work.”—The New York Times Book Review
“[A] remarkable and highly accomplished first novel . . . exquisitely composed . . . I have read it twice, and I still cannot pin it down to a theme or a type. At once symbolical and precise, part fiction, part reportage or memoir, it is beyond category.”—Jan Morris, The Independent
“Beautiful, subtle, and finally, original . . . What moves the prose forward is the prose—the desire to write, to defeat solitude by writing. Cole has made his novel as close to a diary as a novel can get, with room for reflection, autobiography, stasis, and repetition. This is extremely difficult, and many accomplished novelists would botch it, since a sure hand is needed to make the writer’s careful stitching look like a thread merely being followed for its own sake. Mysteriously, wonderfully, Cole does not botch it.”—James Woods, The New Yorker
“The most thoughtful and provocative debut I’ve read in a long time. The best first novel of 2011.”—The Daily Beast
