Black Dove

Praise

Praise for Black Dove

Tor.com Can’t Miss Indie Press Speculative Fiction for January and February 2023
A Globe and Mail Best Book of the Year

“I have long been convinced that Colin McAdam is a literary genius. What’s extraordinary is that each of the books he writes is a totally distinct type of genius. Every time. He’s in a league of his own.”
—Max Porter, author of Grief Is the Thing with Feathers

“McAdam chronicles a boy’s magical transformation in this brooding, memorable outing… Readers will be enchanted by this dark adventure.”
–Publishers Weekly

“Fairy tales have always contained elements of nightmares, but rarely are they so graphically presented… Mr. McAdam posits storytelling as a kind of apotropaic magic that wards off tragedy by depicting its most frightening forms. I think I see what this gifted and unpredictable author is after, but I’m not yet ready to forgive him for subjecting me to such terrors.”
–The Wall Street Journal

“Colin McAdam conjures, in intoxicating prose, a grief-haunted boy offered a kind of Mephistophelean deal by a contemporary Dr. Moreau. Black Dove is tenderly nightmarish and toughly tender—a divine tale of yearning and revenge served up red-hot and with a side of broken hearts.”
—Zsuzsi Gartner, Scotiabank Giller Prize–shortlisted author of The Beguiling

“Colin McAdam’s voice is original and fiercely intelligent. It somehow possesses this combination of hard-won world weariness and exuberant, unshakeable faith in a better world. He exposes all of our treacherous and base instincts but with the unspoken caveat that, in spite of our horrible human ways, we must always, relentlessly, struggle to love each other. Aside from McAdam’s great talents as a storyteller, it’s this feeling I get from his work, profoundly moving, that I strive to duplicate in my own writing.”
—Miriam Toews, Scotiabank Giller Prize–shortlisted author of Fight Night

“Black Dove is an eerie, unsettling, fabulous book. McAdam leads the reader through quotidian and mythical realms with absolute assurance. Stark and beautiful, horrifying and lyrical, its pages thrum with flight, transformation, grief, revenge, transcendence, the remorseless power of stories and the very nature of creation. Ever since reading, Black Dove has drifted in and out of my dreams.” 
—Helen Macdonald, author of the New York Times bestselling H Is For Hawk
 
“If, like me, you read to have your mind blown and your heart stretched, then Colin McAdam’s darkly magnificent Black Dove is for you. McAdam never writes a false sentence and is unflinching in his depiction of human cruelty, violence but also the most delicate and ennobling love. Black Dove is an extraordinary feat of imagination and of art.”
—David Bezmozgis, Scotiabank Giller Prize–shortlisted author of Immigrant City


Praise for Colin McAdam
 
“Both disarmingly familiar and richly, movingly strange.”
—The Wall Street Journal

“A powerful, poetic, bawdily funny, and tenderly sad novel about class, about love, about drink, about poetics, about land, and about money—a few of the salient things that life and history are made of.”
—O, The Oprah Magazine
 
“McAdam’s novel is complex, subtle and intensely moving.”
—The Guardian

“A riveting story that breathlessly and beautifully swallows the reader, so there is the sensation of being in there and not just observing what happen . . . Reading it is a marvelous experience.”
—Elizabeth Strout, bestselling author of Olive Kitteridge, Winner of the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction
 
“McAdam teases and turns around language, giving us a creative and wondrous portrait of nonhuman society from the inside out.”
—Slate
 
“A work of exquisite sensitivity and prowess, McAdams’ tale is of two species astride not a divide but a continuum, of our longings and resiliencies and the fate we share: being stronger than we are evolved.”
—Alex Shakar, author of Luminarium