Telephone

ARIN KEEBLE, THE TIMES LITERARY SUPPLEMENT (UK)

"It is taut, affecting and typically idiosyncratic. At its heart is the wrenching story of a middle-aged couple dealing with the sudden onset of their adolescent daughter's degenerative illness. But it is also a campus novel and a Trump-era, borderland thriller, and these unlikely modulations cohere in compelling fashion ... one of the author's best novels, amid a welter of competition. It should be widely read. And so, more generally, should Percival Everett."

SEBASTIAN SARTI, FULL STOP

"For fans of Everett's more satirical fictions, Telephone might seem like a wayward attempt at conventionality, but behind the homebound setting's realist framing is a novel no less attuned to the culture around it and, despite its restraint, no less intelligent in its forms of representation, an accomplishment all the more impressive for working within the ostensible constraints of the domestic drama genre."