LONGLISTED FOR THE BOOKER PRIZE 2022
SHORTLISTED FOR THE JAMES TAIT BLACK PRIZE FOR FICTION 2023
SHORTLISTED FOR THE ORWELL PRIZE FOR FICTION 2023
Guardian Book of the Year | Independent Book of the Year | New Statesman Book of the Year | BBC Book of the Year | New York Times Editors’ Choice
‘A sparkling, imaginative gem… A gorgeous celebration of pioneering thinkers who rejected docility and self-abnegation. … Enthralling.’ Independent, Book of the Month
‘After Sappho is a book that’s wholly seduced by seduction and that seduces in turn. And that’s partly because the sentences, crisply flat yet billowing easily into gorgeous lyricism, feel so easily, casually of our time. … Breathlessly, carnally beautiful… Something new and necessary.’—Guardian, Book of the Day
‘A one-of-a-kind book that channels a spirit of righteous anger as well as a lyrical freedom and joy.’ —Guardian, Books of the Year
‘Desire, art and politics lead the dance in After Sappho … a mesmerising, uplifting, and most inspiring novel. It’s a great literary achievement.’ —New Statesman, Books of the Year
‘A glorious, genre-expanding work of fiction… Spell-binding.’ —Telegraph, 5* review
‘Formidable… Engrossing… Part history, part Greek chorus, [After Sappho] flits between the strident, sorrowful voices of feminism’s foremothers to bring them crashing into 2022. We’ve never needed to hear from the feminists of history more – and After Sappho gives us reason to hope that things can still get better.’ —The i
‘Highly original, practically uncategorisable… [After Sappho] is an entrancing choric collage of a novel. … I loved it.’—Daily Mail
‘Bold... radical... artful... Less fiction than vitally fictionalised fact, this fine novel is an inspiring and witty ode to sisterhood and sapphism. … I haven’t read anything I’ve loved so much in a long time.’ —Literary Review
‘Daring… Revisionary… [After Sappho] takes a lesson from its subjects, women who passed across identities, across conventions.’ —The Times Literary Supplement
‘[After Sappho] is absolutely wonderful. It brought me to tears several times.’ —Charlotte Higgins, Chief Culture Writer, The Guardian
‘One of the most interesting, inspiring and hands-down lovable novels of the year.’ —Justine Jordan, Fiction Editor, The Guardian
‘Rousing, provocative and elegant… After Sappho delivers on its own premise with great stylistic power and verve.’ —The Irish Times
‘After Sappho considers the intimate moments beyond historical record, shifting our gaze and questioning the discipline of history itself. Schwartz builds a novel around women’s struggles for self-determination, excising the men who were in their way. For the most part, these men simply do not appear in the book at all. The novel is erudite and chatty, grounded in scholarship yet freed from any masculinist impulse or linear cohesion. She draws from history in order to reimagine it. “Have you forgotten that a poet lies down in the shade of the future?” Schwartz asks. “She is calling out, she is waiting. Our lives are the lines missing from the fragments.”’ —New York Times, Editors’ Choice
‘After Sappho accomplishes what only the most generous art can: It makes a more perfect world out of the imperfections of our own. … A work of stirring genius, a catalogue of intimacies and inventions, desires and dreams.’ —Washington Post
‘[After Sappho] is a book to be consumed slowly, to be savoured like a glorious sunset even as it screams the inevitability of the night. After Sappho is an incantation against the darkness and a call to the light.’ —Boston Globe
‘A brilliant debut. … In passages often recalling the sensuous prose of Ali Smith, After Sappho tracks not just outer movement, but psychological ambulation, picking up on the subtlest shifts in mood with the delicacy of a weathervane… A ravishing mosaic of creative subjectivity and self-fashioning.’ —NPR
‘This book dares to invent a new form, one that embraces the maddening fragmentation of so many important women in history and reclaims it as a kind of revolutionary beauty. An exciting, luxurious work of speculative biography.’ —Kirkus Reviews, starred review
‘A brilliant debut novel. The collective first-person “we” narrator – a Greek chorus devoted to the female poet Sappho – weaves the stories of writers, painters, and performers who, like Sappho, were attracted to women and are determined to become their authentic selves through art. … As the chorus narrates, “we were plunged back into history and we had barely survived the first time.” Schwartz’s account of what happens next as the central characters resist oppression speaks volumes on their efforts, and she contributes her own work of art with this irresistible narrative. Astonishing.’ —Publishers Weekly, starred review
‘[After Sappho], longlisted for this year’s Booker Prize, is a triumph. For the Sappho fangirls and others.’ —The Age, Fiction Pick of the Week
‘I have a feeling that as good as this book is on first reading, it will be even better on subsequent readings, such is the density, scope and research that has gone into its making.’ —Herald Sun
‘After Sappho creates a vision of creative, sexual and romantic connection between women that is as lush and joyful as it is enraged by men’s violence.’ —Australian Book Review
‘An ecstatic read… Selby Wynn Schwartz gives us a dark herstory; one that is hysterically funny, poetic and maddeningly tender. It is skin and sinew and breath and longing. And becoming.’ —The Conversation
‘Enchanting… Unique… Awe-inspiring… In this Greek chorus of a novel, After Sappho joins the rank of delectable, Woolf-inspired works.’ —FirstPost
‘After Sappho is about the process of becoming, the difficulties it entails, the voyages it necessitates, the new love it kindles, the furies it stokes… Schwartz’s novel sparkles like the flutes of Kir served at Natalie Barney’s salon at 20 rue Jacob, Paris. This is a novel that is enamoured of shifts in light, the many moods of a lover, thin cucumber sandwiches. This is a novel that ripples with mirth.’ —Indian Express
‘After Sappho is an important reminder of how precarious women’s personhood has been, and remains. With abortion rights being rolled back in the US, with women’s right to choose their marital partners shrinking in India, with women being murdered for rejecting sexual attention, it is important to revisit this history – and remember that such battles can be long and with many a reversal, but they are transformative and not necessarily lonely.’ —The Hindu
‘After Sappho is superb. Mesmerizing. Such incredible writing. And thinking. Selby Wynn Schwartz tips everyone out of the water.’ —Deborah Levy, author of the Booker Prize-shortlisted novels Swimming Home and Hot Milk
‘What a wonder. This book is splendid: impish, irate, deep, courageous, moving, funny… and truly significant.’ —Lucy Ellmann, author of the Booker Prize-shortlisted Ducks, Newburyport
‘It’s brilliant, an unobtrusive, quietly mesmerizing, imagined collocation of linked feminist lives that succeeds in delineating a movement bigger than all of them without diminishing any one of them. … An inspiration.’ —Ian Patterson, poet and reviewer
‘After Sappho is something special. It’s a book that provides hope. You get the sense that there is a hand being projected out to you – offering you comfort, security, a friend.’ —Books and Bao