Critical Praise

"This book delights with its discrete structuring... The pieces snap together in odd juxtaposition, surprising, making a picture more sturdy and dependable than the seamless whole. It has the power of good old Byzantine mosaic."

—Padgett Powell, author of The Interrogative Mood

"This is a wonderful novel. Original, suspenseful, funny and profoundly moving. It’s about family, community, the human bond with animals and--oh yeah--spaceships. I am in awe of Yannick Murphy’s achievement and I plan to recommend The Call to everyone I know."

—Geraldine Brooks, Pulitzer Prize-winning author of Caleb's Crossing

"Yannick Murphy’s beautiful new novel is a stirring example of what a real writer can do with form and feeling. The Call is sly, funny, scary, honest, wonderstruck and, most of all, intensely generous."

—Sam Lipsyte, author of The Ask

"A startling story... Murphy’s eye for small-town detail and human/animal relations makes for a complex, delicate story line, and the novel as a whole carries a very real human velocity and gravity. The domestic focus and unexpected intrusions recall fiction by Dave Eggers and Vendela Vida."

—Library Journal