"A hero with Huck Finn's heart and charm, lighting by El Greco and jokes by Punch and Judy. . . . Riddley Walker is haunting and fiercely imagined and—this matters most—intensely ponderable." —Benjamin DeMott, The New York Times Book Review "This is what literature is meant to be." —Anthony Burgess "Russell Hoban has brought off an extraordinary feat of imagination and style. . . . The conviction and consistency are total. Funny, terrible, haunting and unsettling, this book is a masterpiece." —Anthony Thwaite, Observer "Extraordinary . . . Suffused with melancholy and wonder, beautifully written, Riddley Walker is a novel that people will be reading for a long, long time." —Michael Dirda, Washington Post Book World "Stunning, delicious, designed to prevent the modern reader from becoming stupid." —John Leonard, The New York Times "Highly enjoyable . . . An intriguing plot . . . Ferociously inventive." —Walter Clemons, Newsweek "Astounding . . . Hoban's soaring flight of imagination is that golden rarity, a dazzlingly realized work of genius." —Jane Clapperton, Cosmopolitan "An imaginative intensity that is rare in contemporary fiction.' —Paul Gray, Time Riddley Walker is a brilliant, unique, completely realized work of fiction. One reads it again and again, discovering new wonders every time through. Set in a remote future in a post-nuclear holocaust England (Inland), Hoban has imagined a humanity regressed to an iron-age, semi-literate state—and invented a language to represent it. Riddley is at once the Huck Finn and the Stephen Dedalus of his culture—rebel, change agent, and artist. Read again or for the first time this masterpiece of 20th-century literature with new material by the author.

'This is it... this is my destiny woman,' Max blurted out when he first met Lola Blessington at the Coliseum shop. Not only was Lola aristocratic and wild at heart, but the two had discovered an uncanny convergence of musical tastes. Soon they were converging at every level- Lola filling Max's emptiness and vice versa. But Max had also always craved the recognition of another sort of woman, the sort who had been homecoming queen at her highschool- just as tempting as Lula Mae Flowers had been in Texas. Why did Max have to meet Lula Mae just when he'd found his destiny woman in Lola? And what everyone wanted to know was this- if Lola embodied everything Max longed for, how could there be anything left over for Texan ex-homecoming queens?