'If you want to get at the molten heart of contemporary fiction, Abani is the starting point.'

Dave Eggers

'Chris Abani's Song For Night is a novel that demands to be read. A compressed fable of an African child soldier in a nameless country, it should and will win a wide audience for the importance of its subject matter and the lyricism of its writing.'

Malcolm Knox (Sydney Morning Herald)

'I ask myself: How can a novella shaped from such crazed brutality turn out so beautifully? Why does a narrative about incessant atrocity create such positive emotion? … It never gives up on hope. On the hope for hope. Or the ghostly dream of it.'

Nigel Krauth (Weekend Australian)

'Song for Night contains, at once, an extraordinary ferocity and a vulnerable beauty all its own.'

(New York Times)

'Song for Night is a devastating portrait of a boy holding onto the shreds of his innocence during a war that deliberately, remorselessly works to yank it away.'

(Los Angeles Times)

'It is one of the most powerful stories I have read in a long time.'

Wendy Noble (Good Reading)

Abani 'brings to mind Babel, Hemingway, McCarthy.'

(Esquire)

'Chris Abani is a writer of mesmerizing powers, embracing warmth, and transcendent compassion.'

Donna Seaman (Booklust)

'Song for Night is an important work ... [it] has genuine literary value, written in a voice that is intrinsically beautiful in its lilting simplicity – the voice of a character who remains, essentially, a child, despite all that he has seen and done ..., I’ll definitely seek out the earlier contributions of this immensely powerful, original author.'

Sophie Mallam (First Tuesday Book Club, ABC TV)

'This is a powerful piece of writing, haunting and bleak, but with an uncanny glimmer of hope for the human spirit.'

Michelle Calligaro, Assistant Manager of Readings Carlton (Readings)

'The genius of Abani's work derives from his intellectual engagement with our world and his unflinching depictions, in the most mesmerizing language imaginable, of its most insidious horrors and its richest beauties. Song for Night demonstrates, yet again, why Abani ranks among our most incendiary and emotionally devastating and important writers.'

Andrew Ervin (MiamiHerald.com)

'Abani is finely attuned to the sufferings of women, and especially young girls, in a patriarchal, power-obsessed world, and he works with a moral imperative to unravel the bizarre and corrupt practices that supposedly transform boys into men.'

(Washington Post)

'It's an emotional king hit from a courageous writer.'

(Qantas The Australian Way)

'With a daring blend of horror and beauty, Abani takes his chilling theme and turns it into something rich and strange.'

Daniel Trilling (The Observer)