Lost Empress

Lost Empress is zealous and unruly, jolting and uproarious … a brawler, a spoiler, a broad societal farce … Reading it is a little like being accosted by a brilliant conspiracy theorist on the night bus home. - Guardian.

A formally ambitious, loopy, freewheeling, angry, expansive patchwork of intertwined voices … By the time we reach the dizzying, desperate final act (featuring a prison break, romance, one of the most gripping David and Goliath matches in fiction and the possible end of time) we are exhausted - but entertained. - Daily Telegraph.

Impressive in its vigour and virtuosity, pleasing in its exuberant fancy, admirable doubtless in its commitment to questions of social justice and its indictment of the reality of the American criminal justice system with its mass incarceration … There are echoes also of Joseph Heller’s Catch 22, a novel which employed the absurd in order to expose absurdity. - Scotsman.

The great achievement of Lost Empress is that its impressive feats of literary-cultural allusion, formal experiment, philosophical musing and canny satire are often balanced by, and eventually become secondary to, old-fashioned, flat-out, suspenseful story-telling. - New Statesman.

De La Pava is a maximalist worldbuilder, and the incredible multiverse he constructs in this book

establishes him as one of the most fearsomely talented American novelists working today. - Publishers Weekly.

If Thomas Pynchon and Elmore Leonard had conspired to write North Dallas Forty, this might be the result: a madcap, football-obsessed tale of crossed destinies and criminal plots gone awry … A whirling vortex of a novel, confusing, misdirecting, and surprising-and a lot of fun. - Kirkus Reviews.

A hilarious, smart, and madcap novel that occupies the porous border between comedy and drama, science and philosophy, story and dream, grim reality and pure imagination. A singular achievement. I’ve never read anything like it.

A tour de force that puts De La Pava in rarified company, like Tom Robbins meets Thomas Pynchon … Think screwball comedy with a Stephen Hawking twist . . The method behind the madness is, well, brilliant. - Dallas News.