Englander's Novel

One is eagerly looking forward to The Ministry of Special Cases, Nathan Englander's debut novel. Set in 1976 Beunos Aires, it deals with a couple's search for their vanished teenage son. In Esquire, Tyler Cabot says: "Englander's prose moves along with a tempered ferocity -- simple yet deceptively incisive...Englander's book isn't so much about the search for a lost boy. It's about fathers and sons and mothers and faith and community and war and hope and shame."

And in Bookforum, Peter Terzian calls it "harrowing and brilliant", adding: "Englander's great gifts are an absurdist sense of humor and a brisk, almost breezy narrative voice. He handles his unbearable subjects with the comic panache of a vaudeville artist, before delivering the final, devastating blow."

Oh dear. All this is causing expectations to soar to dangerously high levels.