Elysium

Reviews

“This haunting, surreal story about surviving at all costs…[is a] rich exploration of identity and memory.”

“Some of the praise heaped on this book includes the words ‘audacious,’ ‘ambitious,’ and ‘hard to believe this is a first novel.’ These are all entirely apt…Every once in awhile it’s great to see a book with such unconventional structure, that takes the genre playbook, tears all the pages out, and shuffles them back together and still manages to tell both one and many moving and satisfying stories.”

“Jamye Méri Grant does wonderful work here. She has a lovely low alto, which I always think is the most adaptable pitch for many voices…The audiobook production offers a clever adaptation of the text…a gorgeous book.”

“Brissett deftly handles the challenge of a multitude of characters all being the same people in a multitude of places that are the same place, while exploring complicated questions about identity.”

“The novel’s unsettling and unusual structure works because Brissett skillfully seeds symbols and repeats elements to carry the reader through each version of the world. Just as the heroine/hero slowly comes to realize what is happening to the world, so, too, does the reader.”

“It’s really quite difficult for me to believe it’s a first novel, it’s so good: incredibly ambitious, beautifully written, moving, and with an extremely poignant ending, not to mention that remarkable, intricate balancing act with all your various hall-of-mirrors characters.”

“The style flows and draws you into the fiction and keeps you there—poetic in its imagery but simultaneously economical. It’s a science fiction, post-apocalyptic, tale, a love story, but not your dumb old man’s love story. A love story for a new age.”

“An audacious first novel that pushes against the limits of the form…Elysium is a book like no other.”

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