Marshlands

"A first novel of human suffering and love in a war-torn wilderness, constructed with great verve and brilliance." --Jesse Norman, New Statesman

"Olshan's devastatingly beautiful novel is more than a powerful critique of the senselessness of war. Marshlands is a gripping story about the dangers of idealism, the bonds that can form across cultures, and the complicated nature of betrayal . . . Marshlandsis a searing and evocative book that establishes Olshan as a writer to follow, and articulates the value of compassion and ethics amidst the murky landscape of war." --Laura Eggertson, The Toronto Star

"Powerful." --Booklist (Starred Review)

"I am haunted by this book. . . .Olshan's prose, so spare and unsentimental, and the book's fraught political atmosphere, so coolly rendered, are remarkably reminiscent of J.M. Coetzee's work, as is the strange, almost fairy-tale quality of a story at once so specific in its details and so general in its detachment from any particular time or place . . . That is the brilliance of Olshan, and of this book--to make what is so familiar foreign, and in the strangeness allow us to feel as if from afar what it is to be ourselves." --Ellen Akins, The Minneapolis Star Tribune

"An eerie, dreamlike atmosphere pervades this novel of struggle and oppression . . . Strange, otherworldly, and somewhat sinister." --Kirkus

"Marshlands is a first novel of considerable maturity: powerful, original, cunningly constructed and timely. " --Julian Barnes

"Marshlands is a Waiting for the Barbarians for our tech exhausted age, a post millennial boom-bust Kafka. Matthew Olshan spins a tale around one devastating truth: the real nightmare begins when you finally wake up." --Marlon James

"If Kafka, Hemingway and Teju Cole happened to collaborate, the result might be something like Matthew Olshan's Marshlands. This is an important book that splices a number of literary traditions and is told in a formally adventurous manner. But more important than all that, it gets you in the gut, line by line, page by page." --Giles Foden

"Much in the manner of Coetzee's Life and Times of Michael K, Matthew Olshan's Marshlands holds a fantastic mirror to the war-torn world we live in. This novel is a rich and troubling experience." --Madison Smartt Bell