On the Edge

Reviews

"This is the great novel of the crisis. The corrosive voice of Rafael Chirbes paints a portrait of a universe of unemployment and disappointment—the long hangover that follows the party of corruption." — El Pai´s

"On the Edge, Chirbes’s masterpiece, arrives as a message in a bottle among all the cans, rusting appliances, and tangled tackle. The fumes of the lagoon mix with the lingering sulfur of the Atocha railway-station bombing; the Spanish economy has all but collapsed. Who, or what, is to blame? Chirbes’s novel accuses everyone." — Joshua Cohen, Harper's

"A moving, densely detailed portrait of people without hope." — Kirkus Reviews

"Rafael Chirbes’s On the Edge is a novel for our time." — Norman Rush, New York Review of Books

"Chirbes, one of Spain’s premier writers, is at his best when fully immersed, as he is in this novel. If Proust and an Old Testament prophet had collaborated to write about Spain’s recession, it might have been something like the writing here—agonized, dense, full of rage, and difficult to forget." — Publishers Weekly

"Easily one of the year's finest and most important work, Chirbes's ON THE EDGE stands out as a marvel of what fiction is capable of dong (and, oh, that inescapable cover!)." — Jeremy Garber, Three Percent

"Utterly convincing in its psychological details, but also memorable for the beauty of its writing and rhythms." — Colm To´ibi´n

"On the Edge is masterful, a centrifugal novel with sentences like sticky tentacles that clutch onto readers and suck them into a swirling, tempestuous, pulsating center." — Valerie Miles

"Rafael Chirbes is one of the greatest European authors of our time." — Le Monde

"Literature, as Adorno once said, is a clock that keeps ticking. But it is also the best tool for understanding the world when reality is torn to shreds. Both rules are strictly complied with by great authors. And Rafael Chirbes is one of them." — El Mundo