Praise for The Jane Austen Book Club

“If I could eat this novel, I would.” —Alice Sebold

“This exquisite novel is bigger and more ambitious than it appears… Fowler’s shrewdest, funniest fiction yet, a novel about how we engage with a novel. You don’t have to be a student of Jane Austen to enjoy it, either…Lovers of Austen will relish this book, but I envy any reader who comes to it unfamiliar with her. There’s no better introduction.” —Patricia T. O’Connor, The New York Times Book Review

“Karen Joy Fowler creates a novel that is so winning, so touching, so delicately, slyly witty that admirers of Persuasion and Emma will simply sigh with happiness.” —Michael Dirda, The Washington Post Book World

“The Jane Austen Book Club offers a sparkling rumination on the act of reading itself and how beloved books can serve as refuge, self-definition, snobbish barricades against other people or pathways out of the old self to a wider world. [It is] a terrific comic novel about a closed society merrily transforming itself by reading.”—Maureen Corrigan, NPR’s All Things Considered

“The Jane Austen Book Club amounts to a witty meditation on how the books we choose, choose us too.” —David Kipen, San Francisco Chronicle

“[Fowler] does so terrific a job of bringing her characters to life that Austen’s work falls away like a husk. It’s an impressive feat of homage, since Fowler essentially borrows Austen’s great themes…and makes them her own. Miss Austen would be proud.” —John Freeman, The Denver Post

“For those who love a good book, the object of their affection is rarely the subject of one. But if there was ever an invitation to settle down with a cup of Earl Grey and a smart story with literature at its heart, this is the one.” —Anita Sama, USA Today

“Ms. Fowler, an original and unexpectedly voiced novelist, takes her own place among the shining responders. Not just with comments of her own, though there are some excellent ones, but with the entire playful structure of her new novel.” —Richard Eder, The New York Times