'A virtuoso performance - but also a great book to keep you company on long summer evenings'

'Bursting with strong, well sculpted characters'

'A frequently shocking, resolutely unsentimental and quite brilliant epic, as far from the romanticised western as it is possible to get'

'It is hard to resist its nimble prose and vivid characters'

`a powerful and ambitious book'

'The language is very beautiful...very brave and there are all kinds of registers of language...the storytelling is fabulous'

"The story is told with extraordinary ingenuity, the tone a mixture of the playful and the grave, at times fast-moving, smart and very clever, and then full of beautiful writing and heart-breaking sequences"

"Redemption Falls is a gem. It's a glorious book, enormous, virtuoso and brave. Its scope is wide - love, death, war, belonging - and yet its gaze is intimate. The language is at turns bawdy, ancient, poetic, grand and funny. The minute I finished the book I wanted to start reading it all over again"

"This book took my breath away. It is panoramic, yet dense and delicious in detail. It is written gloriously, as if Mr O'Connor toiled at some mighty cathedral organ containing the whole of the English language with its Irish and American flavourings. This is a brave book and only a brave heart could have written it"

'It is a gloriously polyphonic work...a major work of modern fiction from an astonishingly accomplished writer'

2008-06-17 challenging, but worth persevering

I've read Joseph O'Connor's books before and really enjoyed the humour in the early ones and then loved 'The Star of the Sea' which really puts his writing on a new level. I found this book a little hard to get into as it's not your average novel. But after a while, I got used to the unusual story-telling and found that it was compelling. The novel has real pace, even though it's 700 odd pages long and though initially there seem to be diversions, it's all relevant in the end. I think this book is a real achievement and I wouldn't be suprised if it wins awards.