Comment

May 28, 2011
"Easily one of the most-heralded novels of the season, and deservedly so. Indeed, its achievement surpasses a merely entertaining academic romp. In bright and rangy prose, and endlessly playing on some of Shakespeare’s recurrent motifs and themes – succession anxieties, mistaken identities, appeals for vengeance and mercy, the interlocking of concealment and exposure, the mirroring of promise and betrayal – the novel is far more a funny, often moving autobiography of a serial forger’s ambivalence-filled son, which becomes in turn a middle-aged writer’s stocktaking of his own family life and career and long-standing, hateful relationship to Shakespeare, only then to transform into a riveting take on the publishing industry’s appetites for buzz books and its matching anxieties about big disappointments." Randy Boyagoda Globe & Mail May 27 2011