“[A] boundary-pushing [and] . . . very funny book. . . . There are few voices in Canadian writing as original as Barwin’s.” – Toronto Star
“This is a Canadian artist who takes risks. The novel gallops along like an escapist thriller, but is also punctuated with moments of pungent comedy that serves as an antidote to the horrors always smouldering in the background.” – Ottawa Citizen
“Barwin is a talented and prolific artist … and this novel showcases his signature style and strengths: acrobatic language bursting with puns, rhyme, alliteration and all manner of wordplay, madcap escapades, and a sprinkle of slapstick. This wildly inventive novel plays by its own rules. In Barwin’s world, imagination is freedom, and comedy, courage.” – Quill and Quire
“A fierce and funny horse ride through hell, told with brio.” – Yann Martel, Man Booker Prize winner for Life of Pi
“A hilarious, deep-hearted and life-affirming adventure, equal parts Sound of Music, Blazing Saddles and matzo ball soup. This is Barwin’s tallest tale yet, a crackers modern Western that meditates (as it moseys) on compassion, kinship and atrocity.” – Sean Michaels, Scotiabank Giller Prize winner for Us Conductors
“This is the most wildly inventive novel I have read in decades, and Gary Barwin is the enormously talented wordsmith who has pulled it off! It begins in the nightmare of the Holocaust in Nazi-occupied Lithuania and travels across Europe and North America examining the plight both of Jews and Indigenous peoples. And through it all we find jokes based on cowboy themes. Jokes! What are jokes doing among these calamities? Displacing the horror, easing the way, making the tragedies, if not bearable, at least something one can talk about without incessant weeping in a world haunted by the past.” – Antanas Sileika, author of The Barefoot Bingo Caller