Open City

Praise

“Reminiscent of the works of W. G. Sebald, this dreamy, incantatory debut was the most beautiful novel I read this year—the kind of book that remains on your nightstand long after you finish so that you can continue dipping in occasionally as a nighttime consolation.”—The New Republic
 
“A psychological hand grenade.”—The Atlantic

“A meditative and startlingly clear-eyed first novel.”—Newsweek

“Magnificent . . . a remarkably resonant feat of prose.”—Seattle Times

“A precise and poetic meditation on love, race, identity, friendship, memory, [and] dislocation.”—The Economist
 
“[Teju] Cole writes beautifully; his protagonist is unique; and his novel, utterly thrilling.”—The Globe and Mail
 
“Lean and mean and bristles with intelligence. The multi-culti characters and streets of New York are sharply observed and feel just right. . . . Toward the end, there’s a poignant, unexpected scene in a tailor’s shop that’s an absolute knockout.”—Salon

“I couldn’t stop reading Teju Cole’s debut novel and was blown away by his ability to capture the human psyche with such beautiful yet subtle prose.”—Slate
 
“An indelible debut novel . . . [It] does precisely what literature should do: it brings together thoughts and beliefs, and blurs borders. . . . A compassionate and masterly work.”—The New York Times Book Review

“The cool, concise prose of Open City draws you in more quietly, then breaks your heart. Who knew that taking a long walk in Manhattan could be so profound?”—New York
 
“Beautiful, subtle, and finally, original . . . Cole has made his novel as close to a diary as a novel can get, with room for reflection, autobiography, stasis, and repetition. This is extremely difficult, and many accomplished novelists would botch it, since a sure hand is needed to make the writer’s careful stitching look like a thread merely being followed for its own sake. Mysteriously, wonderfully, Cole does not botch it.”—The New Yorker
 
“In Cole’s intelligent, finely observed portrait, Julius drifts through cities on three continents, repeatedly drawn into conversation with solitary souls like him: people struggling with the emotional rift of having multiple homelands but no home.” —GQ
 
“[A] complicated portrait of a narrator whose silences speak as loudly as his words—all articulated in an effortlessly elegant prose . . . Teju Cole has achieved, in this book, a rare balance. He captures life’s urgent banality, and he captures, too, the ways in which the greater subjects . . . glimmer darkly in the interstices.”—The New York Review of Books
 
“Open City is not a loud novel, nor a thriller, nor a nail-biter. What it is is a gorgeous, crystalline, and cumulative investigation of memory, identity, and erasure. It gathers its power inexorably, page by page, and ultimately reveals itself as nothing less than a searing tour de force. Teju Cole might just be a W. G. Sebald for the twenty-first century.”—Anthony Doerr, Pulitzer Prize–winning author of All the Light We Cannot See