"Timely.… A well-drawn portrait of two flawed but highly articulate Englishmen in New York."
"Afternoon of a Faun has a propulsive energy.… The denouement, when it arrives, is shocking."
Financial Times - William Skidelsky
"Lasdun’s writing spreads implication like condensed flavor crystals that dissolve in water. By the end of the novel, he has examined every corner of the narrator’s conflicted psyche… without once resorting to cliché."
The New Yorker - Katy Waldman
"Each time we feel that we can definitively decide where to put our sympathies, the story jostles and unbalances us with new insights."
Guardian - Marcel Theroux
"James Lasdun is my favourite ‘should be famous’ writer, his work extraordinarily taut and compelling.… Lasdun expertly demonstrates how inner moral structure is often built on the scaffolding of tenuous and arbitrary rules and self-justification. The complexity of male friendship is also wryly assessed.… Enthralling."
"Afternoon of a Faun is a brilliantly imagined, devastatingly insightful, and powerfully rendered novel of sexual exploitation and betrayal. Like all of James Lasdun’s work, it is meticulously written and intelligent, both a novel of ideas and a cautionary tale for the #MeToo era. Its ending is bitterly ironic, or perhaps just darkly funny, depending upon one’s perspective—and Afternoon of a Faun is about the very drama of ‘perspective.’"
"In an era of sexual reckonings and ‘defunct male prerogatives,’ any decades-old fling is a ticking time bomb an ambivalent ex can choose to detonate at whim. Yet who’s to say what actually happened? Afternoon of a Faun is an exquisitely rendered tale of moral arithmetic, erotic murkiness, and men’s fascination with other men’s scorecards. It’s also Lasdun at his most pleasurably diabolical."
"An instant masterpiece that brings the taut psychological precision of a Chekhov story to a hyper-modern, post-#MeToo setting."
"Afternoon of a Faun is a highly conscientious novel, elegant in its execution and almost humble in its refusal to grandstand, or to turn a story about rape allegations into some didactic allegory."
New Republic - Josephine Livingstone
"[A] brilliant new novel of the #MeToo era"
New York Times - Roger Cohen
"Afternoon of a Faun has a propulsive energy... The denouement, when it arrives, is shocking."
"Slippery, provoking, and very timely... Something fascinating and disturbing takes place: the book's villain is neither the accused nor the accuser but the ostensibly impartial onlooker... In our moment of rampant #MeToo voyeurism, this sleight of hand works to devastating effect."
"Brilliant... Lasdun's writing spreads implication like condensed flavor crystals that dissolve in water. By the end of the novel, he has examined every corner of the narrator's conflicted psyche without once resorting to cliché. "
