Riddley Walker

"A hero with Huck Finn's heart and charm, lighting by El Greco and jokes by Punch and Judy.... Riddley Walker is haunting and fiercely imagined and -- this matters most -- intensely ponderable." -- Benjamin DeMott, The New York Times Book Review"This is what literature is meant to be." -- Anthony Burgess"Russell Hoban has brought off an extraordinary feat of imagination and style.... The conviction and consistency are total. Funny, terrible, haunting and unsettling, this book is a masterpiece." -- Anthony Thwaite, Observer"Extraordinary... Suffused with melancholy and wonder, beautifully written, Riddley Walker is a novel that people will be reading for a long, long time." -- Michael Dirda, Washington Post Book World"Stunning, delicious, designed to prevent the modern reader from becoming stupid." -- John Leonard, The New York Times"Highly enjoyable... An intriguing plot... Ferociously inventive." -- Walter Clemons, Newsweek"Astounding... Hoban's soaring flight of imagination is that golden rarity, a dazzlingly realized work of genius." -- Jane Clapperton, Cosmopolitan"An imaginative intensity that is rare in contemporary fiction.' -- Paul Gray, TimeRiddley Walker is a brilliant, unique, completely realized work of fiction. One reads it again and again, discovering new wonders every time through. Set in a remote future in a post-nuclear holocaust England (Inland), Hoban has imagined a humanity regressed to an iron-age, semi-literate state -- and invented a language to represent it. Riddley is at once the Huck Finn and the Stephen Dedalus of his culture -- rebel, change agent, and artist. Read again or for the first time this masterpiece of 20th-century literature with new material by the author.