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Critical Praise

"In this vast and impressive book, the Swedish novelist Steve Sem-Sandberg revisits these five years of barbaric history. The chronology from April 1940 to January 1945 is handled with great skill... (and) the book is immeasurably strengthened by its multiple points of view... Yet the book is not a mere recitation of crime and evil. There are compound ironies in the fact that Rumkowski wanted to make the authorities acknowledge that ‘the ghetto was a special place’... Perhaps the book’s chief virtue is that it doesn’t attempt to resolve these complexities."

—Tom Deveson, The SundayTimes (London)

"Sem-Sandberg has achieved something monumental, but with a strange and necessary lightness of touch. The Emperor of Lies is sobering, scarifying, and, in its hunger for the truth, enthralling."

—Sebastian Barry, author of The Secret Scripture

"This is fiction of true moral force, brilliantly sustained and achieved. It helps us to do what is so hard, simply to think about the Holocaust. Normally, the mind sheers away in horror after exposure to the accumulation of grueling detail and to the ungraspable weight of the statistics. It is so difficult to focus our imagination, our empathy, and Sem-Sandberg provides a way for us to do that, guiding the reader through the mass of information to the human heart of these appalling events. Fiction here is operating at its best, to close the gap between past and present, between them and us: not through sentiment, but through real understanding. It is a stunning achievement and one to be applauded."

—Hilary Mantel, author of Wolf Hall, winner of the Man Booker Prize

"Sem-Sandberg re-creates the ghetto with intelligent meticulousness and passionate invention . . . It is the humanity of the storytelling, so rich and vivid and yet under such complete control, which entices the readers of this dark book."

—Anna Paterson, The Independent

"A memorable examination of human resilience and the will to survive. It is a most distinguished addition to the literature of the holocaust."

—Peter Burton, The Express

"The author uses the Ghetto Chronicle, a 3,000-page archive set up by Rumkowski in 1940, to give this novel an extraordinary immediacy and power."

—Kate Saunders, The Times (London)

"Sem-Sandberg’s achievement is that this history becomes but a background to a multitude of vivid characters, the ordinary Jewish people of the ghetto, whose experiences he weaves expertly into a mesmerising whole... The Emperor of Lies is a novel about heart-wrenching suffering and extraordinary evil, transformed by Sem-Sandberg’s talents into an irresistible work of fiction, absorbing from first page to last... Dickens would have been very pleased with this novel."

—Carmen Callil, The Guardian