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“... In​ a more just universe, Russell Hoban would be widely celebrated as the author of one of the most ambitious novels of the later 20th century: Riddley Walker (1980). Miserably, though, in much of the English-reading world – including the US, where he was born – he remains best known for his children’s books about Frances the Badger ...”

“... illustrations. The texture of a rug, or the light from a candle, become lessons in transcription. Russell Hoban has evoked a world where objects have a wistful, disjointed existence in which they strive for animal vitality. There is something of Hans Andersen’s melancholy, but something, too, of the tougher world of ...”

“... and satisfy the clearly mixed ‘feelings evoked in us by this telling of losses and gains. In Russell Hoban’s previous, much-admired novel, Riddley Walker, the narrator, ‘connection man’ for a Kent settlement far in the future which lies beyond some obscure cataclysm, agonises in his residual English about the problem of writing. ‘I dont have ...”

“... both powerful and powerless – government officials, or merely the behaviour of dogs. Russell Hoban’s forecast of the future thus depends on the past, and his characters are aware of us. The men of How Fents make their living from digging our iron engines out of the mud, and Riddley Walker laments, without irony, among the ruins of what ...”