Enon

Gorgeous and haunting … Harding’s second novel again proves he’s a contemporary master and one of our most important voices.

Publisher's Weekly

Harding’s skillful whipsawing of the reader from the surreal to the quotidian is the best writing he’s done ... Beautifully turned: Harding has defogged his style a bit and gained a stronger emotional impact from it.

Kirkus Review

I don’t think I’ve read anything quite so strangely moving for a very long time. Such a relief to know there are still writers around who can write about real people, and who notice the world around them, and can turn that into exquisite art. Unbearably tense, but so rewarding as well … every snatch of dialogue seemed pitch-perfect.

Gerard Woodward

Harding writes with superb sensitivity about the mental and physical effects of a broken heart.

Kate Saunders, The Times

A hypnotic portrayal of loss and resilience . . . Harding is an extraordinary writer, for the intoxicating power of his prose, the range of his imagination, and above all for the redemptive humanity of his vision . . . That Enon is a work of fiction that feels authentic as memoir makes it all the more astonishing.

Financial Times

[A] compulsive read … it’s so delicately written that you can’t help but marvel at Harding’s enormous skill

Psychologies Magazine

This is a novel that just requires concentration, is all, and it repays that concentration with writing that is both beautiful and thoughtful.

Bookmunch

Enon distils life in small-town New England with the same specificity and grace that Faulkner brought to small-town life in the rural South.

Vanity Fair

Harding’s elegiac prose is well suited to chronicling the corrosive power of despair

Daily Mail

This is a harrowing and a painfully honest representation of mourning the loss of a loved one, but it is also well balanced with the story of the Crosbys’ life in Enon before the tragedy

Press Association Syndicated Review

A powerful second novel … dedication to describing the smallest of details with evocative yet pungent flair hasn’t escaped the latest novel.

Red Online

[Harding’s] skills reside in creating fully realised and pleasingly odd characters, in engineering surprising and beautiful sentences, and in the eye he has for the minor details of life … Harding is an author who sees the small things others miss … Examining the details of the lives of strangers is Paul Harding’s project and his gift. Hypersensitive to the particulars of ‘this awful miracle of a planet’, alert to every smudge on the consciousness of his narrator, he puts us into a stranger’s shoes and makes us feel, for 238 exquisitely compressed pages, what it might be like to lose everything we love.

Jonathan Lee, Literary Review

This is a harrowing tale and a painfully honest representation of mourning the loss of a loved one. It is well balanced. Not by any means a book to lift the spirits, but a compulsive read.

Irish Examiner

Enon is a beautifully written book … every page is masterful … a harrowing but deeply worthwhile journey.

Sunday Business Post

A beautifully melancholic novel by Paul Harding . . . As with Tinkers, the language of Enon glimmers without feeling precious . . . Mr Harding captures the poignant aches of parenthood.

The Economist

Harding maps his protagonist's broken inner world in fine, elegiac prose.

Sunday Times

Harding’s prose is perfect – simple, sharp and creative.

Observer

An extraordinary follow-up to the author’s Pulitzer Prize-winning debut, Tinkers…His prose is steeped in a visionary, transcendentalist tradition that echoes Blake, Rilke, Emerson, and Thoreau, and makes for a darkly intoxicating read.

New Yorker

A bittersweet mixture of bleakness and beauty

Observer