‘The building unease of the plot is offset by the back and forth between Emi’s text and Alexis’s footnotes, which add humour even as they cast doubt on events. Readers are left unsure what to trust, as the novel questions if true, accurate translation is possible and what is lost along the way … a metatextual feast that will keep readers wondering even after the book concludes.’
Library Journal, starred review
‘It’s to Croft’s credit that she sustains her claustrophobic narrative so deftly, with plenty of plot twists. What ultimately makes this book such a pleasure, though, is the uniqueness of its perspective. Reading a translator translating a translator is a brain-twister like no other, and it can’t fail to change the way you think about language.’
Carrie O’Grady, The Guardian
‘The Extinction of Irena Rey playfully dismantles long-standing conceptions of literary translation … Croft holds everything together with the aplomb of a more seasoned novelist.’
Alice Whitmore, Sydney Review of Books
‘The Extinction of Irena Rey could only be written by master of language, a tamer of different tongues. It is brilliant, fun and absolutely alive.’
Nana Kwame Adjei-Brenyah, author of Chain Gang All Stars
‘Croft serves up a wickedly funny mystery involving an internationally famous author and her translators … This is a blast.’
Publishers Weekly, starred review
‘In time with the steady unveiling of Irena’s skeletons, the novel muses through questions related to aestheticism, Anthropocene ethics, method writing, awards-committee politics, and personal rivalries. Grey Eminence is unpacked, including its dystopian perspective that “art is the uniquely human impulse to relentlessly transform whatever we come into contact with, to undo in order to do or redo.” Exciting developments temper the story’s headiness leading up to its final, disillusioning confrontation. The Extinction of Irena Rey is an incisive literary novel that troubles the divide between art, its interpretation, and real life.’
Michelle Anne Schingler, Foreword Reviews
‘Through this trippy mix of high concept and high tension, Croft takes a real chunk out of the convention of deifying the author as an all-powerful genius to whom translators must be beholden. Reading The Extinction of Irena Rey is like encountering a mischievous forest spirit, full of riddles, and gloriously disorienting, then somehow getting back out of the woods alive.’
Cat Acree, Bookpage
‘On its surface, The Extinction of Irena Rey is a literary whodunit, with whiffs of … semiotic absurdity … Croft has constructed a canny exploration of how even English, despite its unique dominance, might be influenced by its brushes with the mysterious process that is translation.’
The Atlantic
‘Translator Jennifer Croft sends up her vocation in this waggish literary mystery.’
Vanity Fair
‘An interpersonal cacophony that crackles outward … a cleverly layered, multivocal novel that plays with our expectations of who is speaking and how meaning gets made in between authors, translators, and readers.’
Chicago Review of Books
‘An astute take on human communication and the perils of the planet, embedded in a crafty detective mystery.’
On the Seawall
‘The Extinction of Irena Rey puts translators first, and with humour and grace explores art, celebrity, and the power of language.’
Lit Hub
‘Wild … joyous.’
Lauren Groff, Bustle
‘Croft subverts expectations with a blackly comic, fiercely inventive drama that explores the cult of celebrity and the art of translation (an art this critically acclaimed, award-winning translator has mastered).’
Malcolm Forbes, The Washington Post
‘Croft combines big questions with generous, intuitive humor … It’s a rare book that’s equally gifted at provoking thought and laughter. The Extinction of Irena Rey is certainly strange, but it’s also strangely beautiful … Croft has reinvented ecofiction with this seductive, erudite, and terribly funny tale about “book people”.’
Hannah Weber, World Literature Today
‘Croft writes with an extraordinary intensity.’
Olga Tokarczuk, Nobel Prize–winning author of Flights and Drive Your Plow Over the Bones of the Dead
‘A feast of reading, writing, and translation, by a master of all three.’
Foyles
‘Both gossipy and profound, the novel makes hay with intellectual questions of Croft’s day job as well as the nuts-and-bolts aspects of the translation trade.’
Anthony Cummings, The Observer
‘Absolutely bizarre in the best way, it's a fever dream of deception and desire.’
People
‘A wild and wonderfully unruly novel about translation and transmission, The Extinction of Irena Rey is a showcase for Jennifer Croft’s acrobatic intellect, delicious humour and voluptuous prose.’
Katie Kitamura, author of Intimacies
‘Croft … makes for a wickedly funny satirist when it comes to some of the more obsequious behaviours involved in the translator-author relationship. At the same time-even in the midst of a joke — she writes profoundly about the philosophical stakes of translation.’
Kirkus Reviews
‘Embark on a literary journey like no other in Jennifer Croft’s latest masterpiece, where eight translators converge in a mystical Polish forest to decode the magnum opus of the revered author Irena Rey … Croft’s storytelling is both intellectually stimulating and truly enthralling, offering a plot that is genuinely distinctive and captivating. This narrative stands apart from any book I’ve encountered, delivering a reading experience that is refreshingly unparalleled.’
Lana McLean, Ramona Magazine
‘You’ll cancel plans to keep reading this addictive novel.’
Panashe Nyadundu, Elle
‘Mischievous and intellectually provocative, The Extinction of Irena Rey asks thrilling questions about the wilderness of language, the life of the forest, and the feral ambitions and failings of artists.’
Megha Majumdar, author of A Burning
‘Generous and strange, funny and disconcerting, The Extinction of Irena Rey is a playground for the mind and an entrancing celebration of the sociality of reading, writing, and translation written by a master practitioner of all three.’
Alexandra Kleeman, author of Something New Under the Sun
‘In The Extinction of Irena Rey, Jennifer Croft mines the complexity of translation, adoration, and symbiosis. At once a meditation on the networks required to bring literature to worldwide readers and a page-turner about the inevitable fallibilities of those systems, Extinction’s push and pull is both thought-provoking and thrilling. I was rapt.’
Emily Nemens, author of The Cactus League
‘An exquisite pleasure. Croft unearths the interconnection between land and communities, revealing the collaborative networks of forests as clearly and incisively as she does that of the literary world. In this exquisite pleasure of a novel, in which I luxuriated on every page, Croft mines the vicissitudes of the translation world to reveal quite plainly that everything is connected, and translators deserve more.’
Chelsea T. Hicks, author of A Calm & Normal Heart
‘Wittily tracks eight translators in search of a writer who’s gone missing in a Polish forest.’
Financial Times
‘Delightfully wry.’
Booklist, starred review
‘Croft’s novel is about a lot of things: the complexities and beauties of translation, climate change and the mass extinction of species, art’s potential to save or destroy the world, obsession, lust, and much more.’
Ilana Masad, NPR
‘Wrought in lively prose and complemented by a dazzling suite of metatextual hijinks set to the beat of a mystery novel, The Extinction of Irena Rey is an empathetic and comic investigation of the role of the translator within the literary project.’
The Rumpus
‘The Extinction of Irena Rey is bursting with energy and cleverness, Croft’s abundant linguistic gifts and stimulating ideas on display.’
New York Review of Books
‘A dizzying novel … Croft’s sense of humour and her finely drawn characters combine with her gift for depicting the beautiful but forbidding Bialowieza Forest to make The Extinction of Irena Rey a grand entertainment. This is a serious novel, but at the same time, one that doesn't take itself too seriously.’
Alta Journal
‘Croft’s exquisite facility with language is on full display throughout, both in wordplay and in evocative descriptions, particularly of place.’
BookReporter
‘For all its cleverness, The Extinction of Irena Rey is serious about the collective nature of art-making and its interconnectedness with the natural world. What is more, Croft is superb on approaches to literary translation and its orthodoxies (Nabokov hovers at the edges of the text), and she takes some good shots at the cult of the upper-case author into the bargain.’
Laurel Berger, The Spectator
‘Croft’s writing isn’t just highly intricate and well-informed, it’s humane.’
Chris Allnutt, Financial Times
‘Bloody love this book. I think it’s really well done, incredibly clever, perceptive and playful and great in many many ways and also just opens up these much broader conversations about narrative, about translation, about ownership and authorship. I just think it's brilliant and clever in so so many ways and I really take my hat off to Jennifer Croft for crafting something so elaborate and clever and thoughtful.’
Bob the Bookerer
‘This is a thrilling read, particularly for anyone who fancies themselves au fait with the goings-on of the international literary world. The Extinction of Irena Rey is immensely fun.’
Ellen Peirson-Hagger, Prospect
‘Jennifer Croft’s fascinating read focuses on the power and influence of language itself, without which we’d have no stories to pass on.’
Saskia Kemsley, The Standard
Praise for Homesick:
‘Haunting and visually poetic, Croft’s book explores the interplay between words and images and the complexity of sisterly bonds with intelligence, grace, and sensitivity. Poignant, creative, and unique.’
Kirkus Reviews
Praise for Homesick:
‘In this marvel of a book that magically expresses the untranslatable, Croft follows Amy’s tortured path as she asks how far, and in what way, we are responsible for how loved ones’ lives play out. In her struggle to answer such questions, Amy learns the extent and limitations of love’s power.’
Foreword Reviews
Praise for Homesick:
‘Through photographs and prose, Croft’s genre-blending memoir investigates how chronic illness sickens an entire family … A heartbreaking, vanguard, and mixed-media coming-of-age memoir.’
Booklist
