Named a Best Book of the Year by the New York Times and Tor

“Blends numerous genres with a skillful and inquiring hand.... Reading [The Absolute Book] is like holding folds of shot silk to the light, finding green flash in something that looks purple, and appreciating how thoughtfully the warp and weft embrace each other.... I'm in awe of...its precision and care, and its wry, understated humor.” (Amal El-Mohtar, The New York Times Book Review)

“Majestic, brain-bending.... Every once in a while, as a reader, you run into one of those books that is just too big for your mind to entirely take in.... It's quite bracing to come up against the hard edge of your own imagination as you try to pursue a visionary author through the limitless expanse of hers. This is all to say that the experience of reading the New Zealand writer Elizabeth Knox's contemporary fantasy novel The Absolute Book reminded me of how I felt reading Jonathan Strange & Mr. Norrell or The Left Hand of Darkness or His Dark Materials or, to move out of genre, Life After Life or The Underground Railroad. I felt that my position in relation to the book's capacious intellect and imagination and moral purpose was a vertiginous one. It was thrilling and frightening.... Each time I thought the book was done surprising me, Knox flexed her own golden gauntlet and opened another gate and flung me through it.” (Dan Kois, Slate)

"The Absolute Book has the feel of an instant classic, a work to rank alongside other modern masterpieces of fantasy such as Philip Pullman’s His Dark Materials series or Susanna Clarke’s Jonathan Strange & Mr. Norrell. It is everything fantasy should be: original, magical, well read. Its language is assured, lyrical yet never overwrought, and in its surprising twists of fate, its deft characterization and constant forward momentum, it is both accessible and compelling. At 600-plus pages, a book makes demands on the reader simply at the level of how much time they are prepared to devote to it. Yet that very ambition, the sweep and heft of its ideas, ensure that effort expended is amply rewarded.” (The Guardian)