Critical Praise

“An artful mystery set in an era of steamer ships and steam trains, when tourism was new and world travel was a glamorous and sometimes-perilous adventure.” 

—Kirkus Reviews, starred review

“Joanna Scott’s writing is always a wonder, but DE POTTER’S GRAND TOUR, with its hints of Hawthorne’s “Wakefield,” is her best yet: a wizardly dialogue between fact and fiction, the known and the unknown. I’ll be haunted by her elusive, touching and deluded hero for a long time.” 

—Andrea Barrett, author of SHIP FEVER

“Only one of our most knowing prose stylists at the height of her powers could have invented the utterly beguiling experience that is DE POTTER’S GRAND TOUR. Joanna Scott has given us a daringly original and serious novel that in its magical rendering of the interior voices of a Gilded Age European adventurer and his American wife is as credible and moving as it is historically astute. One of the most delightful books I’ve read in years.” 

—Jaimy Gordon, author of LORD OF MISRULE

“Joanna Scott is a writer to treasure, and her beguiling new novel is an intrepid exploration of the world, the past and the human heart.” 

—Peter Ho Davies, author of THE WELSH GIRL

“What a whirl of a book, full of secrets and surprises. Joanna Scott is among the handful of American writers I will always want to read, and in DE POTTER’S GRAND TOUR she offers a capacious circumnavigation of a world tinged by melancholy, love, mystery, shimmering beauty and unlikely passion. A lovely and strangely affecting read.” 

—Jay Parini, author of THE LAST STATION: A Novel of Tolstoy’s Final Year

“Joanna Scott is the great tour guide of contemporary American fiction, navigating us across oceans of memory and longing. In the company of Aimée de Potter as she intrepidly searches for her husband’s ghost and secrets, Scott charts here one of her grandest tours yet, one more utterly singular story only she could have written.” 

—Steve Erickson, author of THESE DREAM OF YOU