‘This sees a great prose stylist tackling plot as never before and creating a truly unputdownable, atmospheric tale of friends in New York City. Big, Jamesian and delicious, it’s a pleasure to read, and there’s the sense that Messud can simply do anything she chooses to do with language’ Joanna Briscoe, Independent on Sunday
‘I’m still in shock that Messud’s imposing, intelligent, bewitching novel didn’t make it to the Booker shortlist, as it’s easily the best book to make a comment on our present times and turn that comment into a stinging rhapsody. I liked it so much I read it twice’ Lesley McDowell, Independent on Sunday
‘The best novel I read was The Emperor’s Children by Claire Messud’ Jane Gardam, The Spectator
‘Claire Messud’s new novel will make her name… intelligent and unsparing… it is the finesse with which she satirises these people but still leaves you caring what happens to them that is the book’s great achievement. The Emperor’s Children is likely to be one of the most talk-about novels of the autumn. Buy two copies; give one to a friend’ Economist
‘The Emperor’s Children is a work of fiction, certainly, but one that rings true. Messud’s portrayal of New York is spot-on’ Financial Times
‘The Booker Prize nominee is back in dazzling form… a book of dazzling reach’ Observer
‘Wolfe-ian chronicle of three Manhattanites… Spry and interesting’ Tatler
‘The Emperor’s Children describes the world of three Manhattan socialites just before 9/11. Books that try and sum up the zeitgeist often feel contrived and superficial, but Messud was just spellbinding – her characters never feel like types simply put there to illustrate a point. She’s one of the most intelligent writers around and this novel was truly exceptional’ Lesley McDowell, Sunday Herald
‘[The Emperor’s Children] is nothing less than an inquiry into the moral codes that animate us, the authenticity of human actions to both the introspective private self and the outer public world… In its scope, style and substance, The Emperor’s Children is an attempt to return the novel to its golden age; it is engaged in a conversation with George Eliot, Henry James, Dostoevsky. Its psychological realism is perfect, its characters thrillingly real, alive and utterly convincing in their subtleties of thought and the ticking of their minds. Messud’s prose is a timely and intensely pleasurable reminder of the possibilities of the English language. To use the word clarity about her style – dense, chaste, luminously intelligent – is to return the word to its origins; this is style as illumination, shining a searching yet sympathetic light on the minds and inner worlds of her characters, and as a radiant mode of moral inquiry’ The Times
‘Masterful… Bravely, [Messud] projects her lively comedy of American manners onto the terrible backdrop of 9/11: an exceptionally bold decision in a novel centred on self-defining myth’ Times Literary Supplement
‘The Emperor’s Children is a state-of-the-nation book that captures the solipsism of 1990s America with a clarity and expansiveness that recalls Edith Wharton’s The Age of Innocence’ Metro
‘Messud’s precise style clothes the story of […] complex romances and relationships with a dazzling glamour. Her keen eye and ear for details of modern living create their colliding lives as a cross between a slicker Friends and a smarter La Bohème’ Saga
‘done it with characteristic delicacy and feeling…In the best tradition of James and Wharton, Messud shows us a world where competing versions of the way to live one's life fight it out to the bitter end… That the characters in The Emperor's Children do in fact feel like people we know, even if we're not personally acquainted with - Machiavellian media types from Australia or compromised Sixties radicals - is testament to Messud's skills. She decided to set her book in New York because "it's a place where almost everybody is from somewhere else," a city full of strangers. And, as her novel so eloquently and startlingly shows, sometimes it is strangers who have the greatest impact on our lives’ The Scotsman
‘In expansive, pellucid prose, Messud propels this fin de siecle feeling narrative so artlessly towards 9/11 that it's a shock when it happens, yet her focus isn't on politics or even tragedy, rather on a generation dangerously and blithely adrift from history’ London Lite
‘beautifully written, of great subtlety and complexity’ Front Row
‘A splendid American novel, contemporary yet historical, with an avalanche of characters flowing across the world from Australia to Manhattan to small-town America and to Florida… This is an ambitious, confident, most readable book by a first-rate storyteller with the youth and vitality to spread a huge canvas and enjoy filling it’ Spectator
‘In creating portraits of her characters that are both incisive and gentle, Messud successfully straddles satire and compassion. Overall, the characters are a collection of lost souls, but none of them are entirely predictable, and Messud’s tale rolls out excellent twists and turns… this novel brilliantly captures its characters’ vulnerabilities and every facet of their rawness and discomfort, taking us on an unlikely but fascinating tour of their lives in the Big Apple’ Scotland on Sunday
‘Our tip on the Booker longlist, this is stirring stuff about the beautiful set searching for meaning against the backdrop of 9/11’ Sunday Times, ‘Style’ section
‘Wonderfully written, [The Emperor’s Children] has an irresistible cast of characters. Their faults are their main attractions…A delight to read, it well deserves its Booker longlist place’ Daily Express
‘Gracefully written… the length of its sentences and the cadences of its prose [are] reminiscent of Henry James’ Independent
‘The allure of New York City and all that it represents scintillates at the heart of Claire Messud’s career-making fourth novel. A sparkling social satire… Beneath its trenchant send-ups and miniaturist marvels, this seductive novel broods on darker themes of entitlement and ambition’ Bloomberg.com
‘Messud has captured a moment and she has captured it brilliantly… I cannot remember the last time I found this kind of ensemble piece so absorbing, or so enjoyable. Messud pushes her characters around masterfully. Her impulses, hidden behind her distractingly elegant prose, are mischievous, perhaps even a little wicked, so she begins by writing a comedy of manners. Then, slowly, this deepens into something more sombre, more chastening… Messud has written a big book about the gleaming surfaces of life, and what they reveal. Her ambition – positively 19th century, I think – is outweighed only by her talent’ Evening Standard
‘Messud manages to get beneath the skin of the privileged generation, her insights piercing and elegantly wrought. Her evocation of New York immediately before 9/11 is an absorbing portrait of the times’ The Psychologist
‘Elegant, nuanced’ GQ
‘Perhaps the central argument of The Emperor’s Children is that, as a form, the traditional novel still matters; that it can engage morally on a level beyond any form of journalism and beyond the mere games of postmodernism… thoughtful’ Daily Telegraph
‘A funny, serious, pin-sharp novel… The Emperor’s Children does not simply show an accomplished author reaching new heights; it reminds us that the novel, in the right hands, still has the power both to entertain and to provoke’ Erica Wagner
‘A comedy of manners set in the months immediately before and after the September 11th 2001 terrorist attacks and involving three bright young things who work in the New York media. The surprise is that such an obvious and overworked cliché can be transformed into so intelligent and unsparing a piece of fiction’ Books of the Year, Economist
