The Kites

What a gold mine!

Jean Paul Sartre

What talent, most certainly, how many ideas and passions too. You seize us and shake us. Ah!

Charles de Gaulle

The Kites is indeed a treasure, capable of accessing an enormous node of insight and almost-overwhelming beauty spliced with bittersweet candor... we are lucky to have it at last. We're going to need it.

BOMB Magazine

Romain Gary has created a gallery of heroes who are willing to die for liberty but have to settle for the lesser victory of self-knowledge

Time

A major literary star ... whose life was stranger than fiction

Guardian

A rebel French writer ... a brilliant storyteller, a master craftsman and one of France's most original writers

Independent

A truly beautiful novel

David Bellos

Gary is brilliant at capturing the existential emotion for which the title of "The Kites" is an obvious metaphor -- sky-bound yet tethered by that string.

Gal Beckerman, New York Times Book Review

More than a humorist, more than a storyteller, he's a moralist, an independent and significant student of the struggle to tell right from wrong, good conduct from bad. This struggle took place within a life that was, as people like to say, itself as good a story as any novel that he wrote

Adam Gopnik, The New Yorker

This final work by a maverick genius of modern French fiction tells a story of love and war that's both charming and moving. It's a perfect introduction to the unique imagination of Romain Gary

Boyd Tonkin

An extraordinary novel about lost love, memory, resistance to tyranny and individual lives caught up in the rush of history

D. J. Taylor

The Kites is a novel touched from beginning to end with grace, a great saga about the innate dignity of love that succeeds in the feat of being funny and poetic, tender and sharp, committed and fierce, with a touch of brilliance in the art of dialogue and situations that avoid the twofold temptation of sentimentality and moral lesson.

Muriel Barbery

What emerges, overwhelmingly, is the sense that, in Gary's hands, fiction itself is a form of resistance.

The Guardian

A hugely enjoyable read

Spectator

Captures [Romain Gary's] slightly absurd gallantry, his humor and compassion, and his love of all things French.

Haaretz

We can weep while reading this joyful novel

Alan Moses, The Times Literary Supplement