Critical Praise
“I loved this novel! Alix Christie’s debut is intensely observed, so much so that I felt myself in the dark rooms of history with the people laboring over the metal and words to bring us print, but also laboring over their own lives and love and survival.”
—Susan Straight, author of HIGHWIRE MOON, National Book Award Finalist
“As beautifully written as the printed pages it describes, this is an intelligent, masterful novel that immerses the reader in a fascinating historical time and place.”
—Rosamund Lupton, bestelling author of SISTER and AFTERWARDS
“Christie has created a rich, masterful tale of “the darkest art” and its powerful effect on the written word.”
—Katie Noah Gibson, Shelf Awareness
“Rich in historical detail…the story of the birth of the printing press is fascinating. Readers who enjoy historical fiction such as Tracy Chevalier’s REMARKABLE CREATURES will enjoy this.”
—Library Journal
“Schoeffer anchors the story, but Gutenberg flashes --- megalomaniacal and duplicitous, with hair ‘wild and bristling to his shoulders…beard cascad[ing]…glinting here and there like twists of wire,’ and ‘glowing, canine eyes.’ Christie masterfully depicts the time and energy required to print the first Bibles, a years-long process of trial and error, tinkering with ink and type, lines and paper, guilder after guilder spent without return, all against a catastrophic backdrop of plague, the fall of Constantinople, the violent superstitions of the peasantry, and a vested intelligentsia fearing the press would generate ‘crude words crudely wrought…smut and prophecy, the ranting of anarchists and antichrists’…A bravura debut.”
—Kirkus Reviews, starred review
“Enthralling…Christie demonstrates a printer’s precision…in her account of quattrocentro innovation, technology, politics, art and commerce.”
—Publishers Weekly, starred review
“This gorgeously written debut, set in the cathedral city of 15th-century Mainz, dramatizes the creation of the Gutenberg Bible in a story that devotees of book history and authentic historical fiction will relish...An inspiring tale of ambition, camaraderie, betrayal and cultural transformation based on actual events and people, this wonderful novel fully inhabits its age.”
—Booklist, starred review
