"A village in the Uckermark, fully in the present, yet rife with legends. In Before the Festival, this village tells its own story – a novel as a compelling multi-voiced chorale put in prose."

Leipzig Book Fair Prize Jury

"This novel should be read much like chocolate should be eaten: not too quickly and not all at one time."

WDR-Hörfunk

"Stanišić writes so directly and poignantly about his homeland, foreignness, and the longing for peace, a humorous yet just as poetic book exuberantly filled with burlesque incidences and tragic-comical stories."

Focus

"A great discovery of the season."

Frankfurter Rundschau

"Before the Feast is a grand book. … This literature is alive."

Freitag

"A book like no other. Politically adept and stylistically a work of art."

Die Zeit

"He seems to be a narrator who has a sheer immeasurable stock to fall back on."

Der Spiegel

"Stanišić has used language to create a village, a kaleidoscope, a cosmos of many voices, tone colours, jargons, the world in a nutshell, magically held together by a collective narrator that belongs to it all, by someone who is shrewd and cunning and smart and a little wise. It is as if it were all about putting straight the caricature of the anti-Heimat novel the typology of which knows only the bungled festival."

Leipziger Buchpreis-Jury

"This kind of narrative is not German, neither is it migrant German. It is more Anglo-American […]. Quite simply a great book."

(Die Welt)

"Reading it puts you bang in the middle of a festival of literature […]. It is a miracle. What luck to have it."

FAZ

"A festival for readers."

Süddeutsche Zeitung

"A book like few others. Politically well-versed and stylistically a work of art."

Die Zeit

"Everything fits: the material, the sense of tragedy, the light and palatable language. Stanišić is adept."

Süddeutsche Zeitung

"The talent of this author is beyond question. Saša Stanišić has written a novel that is brilliant in all its details and in places bursting with high humour."

Neue Zürcher Zeitung

"Before the Feast tells a story of a village in decline, featuring a multitude of loveable, amusing and forlorn characters (both alive and mythological), each of them vibrantly portrayed. Stanisic is unbelievably talented: the way he controls his characters, plot and language is breathtaking. He is a masterful, generous, humorous and imaginative story-teller, and will go down in history as one of the greatest writers of our age, or any age."

Gesche Ipsen, editor, NBG Autumn 2015

"[The novel is] episodic, impressionistic and whimsical; every time you settle down with a character he or she temporarily disappears. But it’s also clever and funny."

The Guardian

"Switching among styles with a dancing virtuosity, Stanišić knits a dozen characters into a multi-stranded tissue of gossip, myth and memory."

Independent

"If the novel misses the passion and elegy of Stanišić's debut, then this child of war and exile knows that a quiet town in a quiet time has a magic of its own."

Independent