“The Murderer is a literary thriller that sheds light on the societal divisions and the undercurrent of political violence that beset Guyana in the 1950s and continued beyond independence in 1966 . . . There are echoes of Fanon, who wrote in The Wretched of the Earth (1961) that among dispossessed populations, in purging troubled histories, ‘rival families decide to wipe the slate clean and forget the past’ . . . The Murderer is a strange, luminous, and beguiling work by a writer with a mysterious and captivating Caribbean voice, who shied away from publicity and is now resurrected.”

– Colin Grant, New York Review of Books

"The Murderer, Roy Heath's masterpiece, is written with immediacy and precision. In a few sentences, Heath creates a psychological tension that is totally convincing and gripping. Slowly, as the main character grows more obsessed and distant from others, he also becomes more complex and fascinating and memorable."

– Colm Tóibín

“Roy Heath’s novels are unlike any I have ever read . . . After some acquaintance with Heath’s characters, the reader finds them not in the least strange, but so familiar as to be frightening.”

– Susan Fromberg Schaeffer, London Review of Books

“Roy Heath’s study of a mind fumbling with shadows . . . has a Dostoievskian power and a haunting Guyanese backdrop that any number of clever and facile novels could not exorcise from my memory.”

– Christopher Wordsworth, The Observer

“A beautiful writer and an unforgettable book.”

– Salman Rushdie

“A writer of prodigious talent and, in his fiction, a chronicler nonpareil of 20th-century Guyanese life and lore . . . Critics saw in his work resonances of Dostoevsky and Tolstoy, Graham Greene and Joseph Conrad. His most acclaimed novel, The Murderer—which Carmen Callil and Colm Toibin list in The Modern Library: 200 Best Novels in English since 1950—won the Guardian fiction prize in 1978.”

– Margaret Busby, The Guardian

“Move Crime and Punishment from the slums of St. Petersburg to the slums of Georgetown, Guyana, and you’ll have something like The Murderer.”

– Michael Harris, Los Angeles Times Book Review

"Roy Heath is one of those gifted writers whose prose seems at once spare and rich . . . The compression, the exotic setting, the faint, persistent threat of violence—the combination works like a troubling dream . . . [A] remarkable novel.”

– Adam Begley, Boston Review

“Simply one of the most astonishingly good novelists of our time.”

– Edward Blishen