Calypso

He’s like an American Alan Bennett - Guardian

Unquestionably the king of comic writing … Calypso is both funnier and more heartbreaking than pretty much anything out there - Guardian

We get more of a glimpse than we have before of what lies behind the carapace of a writer who seems able to turn almost any situation to comic gold … [an] incredibly funny and sometimes moving meditation on love, death and family life, by a master of his craft - Sunday Times

So often Sedaris’s phrasing is beautiful in its piquancy and minimalism … His life is extraordinary in so many ways - the drug addiction, the eccentric family, the crazy jobs, the fame, the globetrotting - but one of the more unlikely achievements here is in making it all seem quite ordinary. Ultimately, his masterstroke is in acting as a bystander in his own story - Guardian on Theft by Finding

Entrancing … This book allows us to observed not just the nimble-mouthed elf of his previous work, but a man in his seventh decade expunging his darker secrets and contemplating mortality … The brilliance of David Sedaris’s writing is that his very essence, his aura, seeps through the pages of his books like an intoxicating cloud, mesmerising us so that his logic becomes ours - Scotsman