Shortlisted for the 2021 Leacock Medal for Humour
Longlisted for the 2020 Toronto Book Awards
Praise for Last Impressions:
“The great achievement of this novel is that the comedy of the present day story is deepened and darkened by the vein of history flowing beneath it, a history of lost loves and lost lives. Last Impressions will make you laugh out loud and cry out loud. What more could be asked of a book?”
—Miriam Toews, award-winning author of Women Talking, A Complicated Kindness, and All My Puny Sorrows
“Joe Kertes knows of what he writes, and it shines through pristine prose on every page of this moving and thoughtful novel. By turns hilarious and heartbreaking, the story’s vivid and memorable characters wrestle with history, secrets, and shadows that simultaneously strain and sustain a family. Brilliant and masterful.”
—Terry Fallis, two-time winner of the Stephen Leacock Medal for Humour
“The patriarch Zoltan looms off the page, larger than life and yet heart-breakingly human. Last Impressions is a testament to the ordinary miracle of family and friendship, of loves lost and loves gained, of secrets concealed and hopes restored, set against the sweep of history, at once epic and intimate.”
—Giller Prize-winning author Will Ferguson
“I finished Joe Kertes’s dark comedy, Last Impressions, and booked a trip to Hungary, so vivid and engrossing is Mr. Kertes’s creation of the Beck Family and their visit back to their father’s past. Cantankerous, unwavering, iron-willed, preposterously hilarious, Zoltan Beck is a protagonist for the ages. Stop streaming and start binging on this unputdownable book.”
—Andrea Martin, award-winning actor
“A funny and moving book about a family mystery and the mysteries of family.”
—David Bezmozgis, award-winning author of Immigrant City and The Betrayers
“Zoltan’s hilarious and heartbreaking story is a satisfying blend of matters domestic and historical.”
—Publishers Weekly
“Kertes is successfully navigating treacherous waters here with a novel that, for all its moments of darkness, emerges as passionately life-affirming and at times unrepentantly hilarious.”
—Canada.com
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