"In January 1971, Uganda's president, Milton Obote, was deposed by his army commander, Idi Amin, (...) followed by a reign of terror. (...) In his hypnotic semiautobiographical novel, Johannes Anyuru, born in Sweden in 1979 to a Ugandan father and a Swedish mother, peels back these layers of turmoil, revealing how Amin's rise to power altered his father's life and provided a prologue for his own. (...)Anyuru's prose is incandescent, effortlessly navigating the turbulence in his hero's life. The story frame is tight, focusing on a few months of P's incarceration and his subsequent exile, but it opens out into a sophisticated meditation on politics, race and ethnicity." -Peter Kimani, The New York Times Book Review
"A deeply moving meditation on identity and history, the personal and the political, blurring the boundaries between truth and fiction." -Kirkus Reviews
"While a resilient human can be broken, resilience itself can't....a lesson that comes across clearly in Anyuru's effective debut novel." -Rain Taxi
"Johannes Anyuru tenderly and poetically paints a masterful portrait of his father, of a voyage, of a quest, and of a life trapped by history. A sometimes terrible and unforgettable destiny which resounds like a cry of hope in the greatest hopelessness. A dangerous but life-saving voyage-be it simply to serve as reminder never again to be forgotten to lift our eyes to the heavens." -Actes Sud
"A strikingly beautiful text pierced with today's doubts and theories about what creates true meaning in the life story of a single human being, as well as in history. This is a personal and universal novel about fatherlessness and identity, about the power of violence and about how we are all prisoners of time." -Aftonbladet
"Johannes Anyuru's language hurls itself, like the main character of this book, straight into the sun, burning and scorching." -Helsingborgs Dagblad
"You feel the breeze from the storm out of paradise, you feel the large movements, you feel the hypnotic effect of a prose that can make you visualize the Angel of History zooming in on a building in Vaxjo. It is fantastic." -Expressen
"Anyuru's searingly poetic style rescues his writing from bleakness and sentimentality alike as he confronts the lies we live by." -The Independent
"A tense, sparse re-telling of a life. This novel is a shining example of literature's ability to give its readers a new perspective on the world, and an excellent way to learn about the emotional consequences of war and exile. I can honestly say that A Storm Blew in from Paradise is the best Swedish novel I have read in a long time. I would advise anyone interested in the writing process, in familial and national ties, in pain, healing, loss and rediscovery to read it." -Swedish Book Review
"A Storm Blew in from Paradise touchingly portrays the drama, absurdity, and insignificance of life as a political refugee." -MO Magazine
