Animals
"Not since Evelyn Waugh’s The Ordeal of Gilbert Pinfold has a disintegrating consciousness been portrayed so convincingly. Funny and nightmarish by turns, Animals is one of those books that one feels compelled to start reading again as soon as one has finished it." The Times
"One of the most head-tighteningly suspenseful pieces of writing I’ve read in years … compassionate, intelligent and forensic" Daily Telegraph
"This strange, beautiful and deeply troubling novel makes the grade as genuine art … [Ridgway is] writing fiction as radically new and provocative as any of the current generation of writers around the world, literary darlings with such exotic names as Eugenides, Hemon, Houellebecq, Kunzru, Murakami, Eggers. " Sunday Independent
"Like Nicholson Baker, Ridgway has the descriptive power to locate the sublime hidden inside mundane minutiae. And like Paul Auster, he knows how the accretion of ordinariness can be made to seem overwhelming and sinister to a bewildered narrator. The result is that Animals is both a funny and surprising inspection of the detail of modern life, and an affecting portrait of a man struggling to make sense of it" Independent on Sunday
" An exceptionally impressive novel" Ireland on Sunday
"… seriously good, seriously original writing … exhilarating, amusing, puzzling and, sometimes, sickening." Arminta Wallace, The Irish Times
"A bold attempt to convey the fluctuations and fevers of a damaged state of mind" Guardian
"Deeply unsettling but utterly absorbing" Metro
"He turns people inside out, detailing their quirks and vulnerabilities with engaging perceptiveness…a concatenation of anecdotes and dream revelations…unnerving in their odd accuracy" The Times
"At once comic and tragic, bright and solemn, this is a tremenduos work." Dubliner
