T Singer

All of the whispers have been right: Solstad is a vital novelist.

Charles Finch, New York Times

Solstad is expert in delineating the absurdities of existence… Solstad exposes us to ourselves.

David Mills, Sunday Times

He’s a kind of surrealistic writer... I think that’s serious literature.

Haruki Murakami

His language sparkles with its new old-fashioned elegance.

Karl Ove Knausgaard

He doesn’t write to please other people... Do exactly what you want, that’s my idea… the drama exists in his voice, in his comments and views, and that works, it helps connect the reader to the story.

Lydia Davis

Solstad's novels are full of dryly comic, densely existential despair . . . reminiscent of Witold Gombrowicz, with his keen sense of the absurd. Both translators Tiina Nunnally and Steven T. Murray have rendered Solstad's rhythms into wonderfully idiosyncratic English.

Nathan Kapp, Times Literary Supplement

[Solstad] is a wonderful stylist whose prose gives the impression of not being stylised at all… The prose is distracted and persistent, compelling and compelled.

Frank Lawton, Literary Review

Before Knausgaard, Norway had Solstad, whose pitiless, mesmeric, darkly comic stories of quiet desperation – here it’s a failed librarian – turn banality to sublimity.

The Arts Desk

An idiosyncratic, at times impish writer, whose voice – insinuating yet direct, droll but aghast – is impossible to ‘unhear’ once you’ve encountered it.

The White Review