Seven Houses in France

A dark comedy about the vanity of human desires which deftly balances compassion and cynicism

Financial Times

Bizarrely funny and beautifully crafted

Times Literary Supplement

Undeniably compelling

Daily Mail

A brilliantly inventive writer...He understands the nature of storytelling and is at once terribly moving and wildly funny

A. S. Byatt

Seven Houses in France is an enjoyable, somewhat frightening novel by one of Europe's best novelists... Atxaga is still the master of a complex story, told with deceptive simplicity

Michael Eaude, Independent

Atxaga’s grim and complicated story is lucidly told

Emma Hagestadt, Independent

Sharp

Guardian

Atxaga’s story is fresh and his treatment of violence psychologically rich

Guardian

It takes a special kind of genius to transform this most unpromising of locations into a vehicle for black comedy, but that is precisely what the Basque author Bernardo Atxaga achieves in this mesmerizing novel

Simon Shaw, Mail on Sunday

Atxaga's novel is much more than a mere chronicle of the colonial era. Inevitably, the reader thinks of Conrad's Heart of Darkness ... but [Atxaga's] story focuses on more intimate corruptions, disappearances more personal and profound, on anxieties more in the spirit of Camus than in the author of Lord Jim

El Pais