This is an extraordinarily accomplished novel that challenges and informs the reader in equal measure.
It's a Samuel Taylor Coleridge poem that lends this extraordinarily vivid novel about two sisters, Elf and Yoli, its title.
Gone with the Wind is an extraordinarily racist novel even by the standards of the time when it was written.
It sounds like a self-help book but it's actually an extraordinarily moving novel about the cycle of life and death in an unnamed country (which, for me, is clearly Pakistan).
From time to time the writing is good enough to make you hope that one day Safran Foer will produce an "extraordinarily brilliant" novel, instead of Everything Is Illuminated: a ragbag of old tricks; a clever book for dumb reviewers.
Rudi is wild, wonderful and outrageous and dances until his feet bleed and we see him through the eyes of a host of different narrators in this extraordinarily powerful novel.
Notwithstanding the controversial subject matter, this is an extraordinarily powerful novel that leads the stunned reader through extremes of both realism and surrealism on an exhausting journey through some of the darkest recesses of European history.
And it's this sense of the familiar revivified — of knowing what's coming yet being emotionally outflanked by it anyway — that best characterizes "The Year We Left Home," an extraordinarily warmhearted novel whose impressive humanity and lightness of touch refresh some narrative elements so abundantly precedented that most fiction writers would have been afraid to go near them.
And as he did in "Snow Falling on Cedars," his extraordinarily popular first novel -- as well as a second novel, "East of the Mountains," and an early story collection, "The Country Ahead of Us, the Country Behind" -- he evokes the natural atmosphere of the Pacific Northwest.
Yes, it's complicated if you haven't read the Iliad, but not when you've been introduced to all the principal characters as vividly, sparely and poetically as Miller does in this extraordinarily accomplished first novel.
