“A brilliant exploration of identity and belonging, and Gaige’s writing is beautiful.”

“It is to the credit of Amity Gaige that her third novel, Schroder, transforms this thriller plot into a deeply moving tale. . . .What distinguishes Schroder is its insight and language. . . Ms. Gaige excels at landscapes; her writing has the still, clear beauty of a mountain lake.”

“[The novel] is contemplative, poetic certainly, but the narrative is urgent and concise and Gaige’s storytelling effortlessly spontaneous.”

““[A] superb novel. . . .Gaige makes fraudulent, kidnapping Eric utterly sympathetic—heartbreakingly so—which is part of this book’s intelligence and depth. We have so little distance from him that we become myopic in our desire to have his outrageous escapade work, even though we know it cannot.”

“Agile. . . transporting...a book that works as both character study and morality play, filled with questions that have no easy answers.”

“Enthralling....Gaige displays an unnerving insight into the grandiosity and fragility of the middle-aged male ego...Schroder is clearly her breakout book. With its psychological acuity, emotional complexity and topical subject matter, it deserves all the success it can find. I wish there were such a thing as a Divorced Couples Book Club just so we could listen in on the tangled responses.”

“Brilliantly eliciting sympathy where, theoretically, none is deserved, this is a tense, ambitious, ­bravura exploration of the physical and psychological limits of identity — how we are seen by others, and what we make of ourselves.”

“Like Nabokov’s Humbert Humbert, Schroder is charming and deceptive, likable and flawed, a conman who has a clever way with words. Schroder’s tale is deeply engaging, and Gaige’s writing is surprising and original, but the real pull of this magnetic novel is the moral ambiguity the reader feels.”

“Schroder is my favourite novel of 2013 so far. Narrated by the titular Eric Schroder, it is a slippery, intelligent and gripping narrative about split identities, paternal love, parental abduction and marital breakdown.”

“[A] fascinating psychological portrait of love, longing and self-loathing...Written as a jailhouse confession to his ex-wife, Schroder’s closest literary relative is probably Lolita (minus the pedophilia): The compellingly unreliable narrator of European background, the East Coast road trip with the precocious child, the narcissism, the unsavory motels, the whiff of danger. Schroder easily stands up to the comparison....And yet the book, at its heart, is a love story. Schroder may be deluded—and a woefully irresponsible parent—but his touching, sincere adoration of his daughter and ex-wife is his great redemption.”

“Gaige’s prose flows effortlessly. . . . found it difficult to put this book down, even when it brought me to tears. Completely absorbed into Eric’s mind, we feel for him, even while we condemn his actions. . .surreal yet completely believeable ... many layered and beautifully written, Schroder is a devastating work that resonates for a long time after the final page.”

“Impossible to put down. . . .Gaige completely creates this alternative universe, and it is entirely suspenseful as readers are drawn to the Schroder/Kennedy character. It’s a credit to Gaige’s talents that she can create such a morally complex character.”

“Schroder’s account of the events is complicated and nuanced, and the noel is absorbing, with a propulsive plot and a narrator who is charming, ambivalent and searching — a man driving by love who understands that love cannot save him.”

“The measure of Gaige’s great gifts as a storyteller is that she persuades you to believe in a situation that shouldn’t be believable, and to love a narrator who shouldn’t be lovable. Seldom has such a daring concept for a novel been grounded in such an appealing character. ”

“Daring...a clean, suspenseful, economical story that is also a clever act of social commentary...As a case study of the unreliable narrator, Schroder is beautifully managed...Gaige is an accomplished writer, and the novel elegantly navigates its ethical razor’s edge, bringing the reader along on a kind of joyride gone wrong.  Novelists like Gaige remind us that we live not in the age of the nineteenth-century marriage plot but in the era of the twenty-first century divorce plot...Gaige writes with a cool strangeness, a strong sense of style...Schroder is by turns dry, peculiar, expansive, and visionary.”

“Gaige writes beautifully...The novel’s climactic chapter is also its best conceived: the item that brings about Schroder’s downfall is perfect, both dramatic and mundane. The reader will realize that he or she has been given every detail necessary to see what was coming, yet didn’t, which is plot-making of the highest order.”

“Tender, improbably exhilarating novel ... a smart, ebullient and affectionate allegory for a post credit-crunch America that’s frayed but by no means irreparably broken.”

“It’s a mark of how good Schroder is that, upon finishing it, I immediately went out and read the rest of her work.”

“You will not want to put this book down. You will want to read it in one big gulp. This is a bullet of a novel, aimed at our pieties about parenthood and familial love. To those who know Gaige’s first two novels, it’s no surprise she’s produced another stunner. To those who don’t, you’re in for a treat.”

“On occasion... a novel will provoke a host of tangled and disconcertingly conflicted reactions-revulsion and affection; blame and understanding; a connection that goes beyond surface sympathy to a deeper, and possibly unwanted, emotional recognition. These were among the things I experienced while reading Amity Gaige’s astoundingly good novel Schroder.”

“In Schroder, Amity Gaige explores the rich, murky realm where parental devotion edges into mania, and logic crabwalks into crime. This offbeat, exquisitely written novel showcases a fresh, forceful young voice in American letters”

““[A] fascinating psychological portrait of love, longing and self-loathing...Written as a jailhouse confession to his ex-wife, Schroder’s closest literary relative is probably Lolita (minus the pedophilia): The compellingly unreliable narrator of European background, the East Coast road trip with the precocious child, the narcissism, the unsavory motels, the whiff of danger. Schroder easily stands up to the comparison....And yet the book, at its heart, is a love story. Schroder may be deluded—and a woefully irresponsible parent—but his touching, sincere adoration of his daughter and ex-wife is his great redemption.”