"A riveting, haunting, incisive, and melancholy document that provides the ultimate example of a writer bearing witness and holding evil to account. Rarely has a writer exhibited such an innate strength of character. Ms. Müller’s book is critical both as a work of art and as a first-hand document."

– The Wall Street Journal

"Müller won the Nobel Prize in Literature in 2009, and The Village on the Edge of the World underscores just how much she deserves that award. Affecting."

– Air Mail

"Superb. Comprehensive. Conducted by Müller’s editor, Angelika Klammer, and skilfully translated by Kate McNaughton, these interviews trace a compelling trajectory. I was rapt, following a child who eats mouldy plums and plants, has laughing fits and feels desperate to belong, watching her grow into a defiant and resilient woman determined to break free."

– Malcolm Forbes, The Telegraph (UK)

"Nobel laureate Müller narrates her life’s trajectory, personal resilience, and literary calling forged by her childhood in totalitarian Romania. It was within this harsh environment that Müller found her writer's voice. An intimate retrospective."

– Booklist

"What is it like living in the autumn of a dictator’s reign? How do years of oppression and trauma affect generations? Nobel Prize–winning novelist Müller provides answers with stark and unnerving insight into the mind of one who suffered the effects of Eastern European fascist rule. Müller offers an excellent addition to any memoir collection, shedding light on a time and place that deserve more attention."

– Library Journal

A harrowing memoir about artistic integrity under state repression, The Village on the Edge of the World collects Nobel Prize-winning novelist Herta Müller’s reflections on growing into her vocation during the socialist dictatorship of Nicolae Ceau?escu. A masterful memoir that meditates on art, legacy, and the endurance of the human spirit."

– Foreword Reviews (starred review)

"The reader is left with a solemn wonder at the singularly meticulous power of Müller’s imagination and her inimitable, granular reverence for language. A riveting account, with bittersweet, lyrical, and hard-won wisdom packed onto every page."

– Kirkus Reviews (starred review)

Praise for Herta Müller:
 
“With the concentration of poetry and the frankness of prose, Müller depicts the language of the dispossessed.”

– Jury of the Nobel Prize for Literature

“A dark collage, which glints with fear—and with beauty . . . Müller’s prose—as poetic as it is blunt—works like a prism, shattering and illuminating a world that is always watching, waiting.”

– The Atlantic

“Nobody since Arthur Koestler in the 1940s has written more intelligently or with such subtle precision about life under totalitarianism… Müller has an exceptionally rare talent—to turn the terrifying, the distorted and the hideously ugly into something uplifting and beautiful.”

– Prospect Magazine

“Perhaps no author has captured the surreal textures of Iron Curtain paranoia quite like Herta Müller.”

– Vogue.com (Best Books of the Month)

“Herta Müller is a passionate artist of protest.”

– Eileen Battersby, Irish Times

“Müller scatters narrative bombshells across a field of dreams.”

– San Francisco Chronicle

“Herta Müller is a writer who releases great emotional power through a highly sophisticated, image studded, and often expressionistic prose.”

– Neal Ascherson, The New York Review of Books

“Especially now, 20 years after the fall of the Berlin Wall, it's a beautiful signal that such high quality literature and this life experience are being honoured.”

– Angela Merkel

“Remarkable . . . The Fox draws on what she suffered while clenched in the jaws of one of history’s most notorious dictatorships. But she infuses characters and events with surreal elements and heightened levels of metaphor that make this much more than a roman à clef. . . . Here, dreams become extensions of life, or life itself is a dream; they are cut, at any rate, from one and the same fabric, consistently lurid and terrifying.”

– NPR

"Müller won the Nobel Prize in Literature in 2009, and The Village on the Edge of the World underscores just how much she deserves that award. Affecting."

– Air Mail

"Superb. Comprehensive. Conducted by Müller’s editor, Angelika Klammer, and skilfully translated by Kate McNaughton, these interviews trace a compelling trajectory. I was rapt, following a child who eats mouldy plums and plants, has laughing fits and feels desperate to belong, watching her grow into a defiant and resilient woman determined to break free."

– Malcolm Forbes, The Telegraph (UK)