"A stimulating journey around Johannesburg and into the restless minds of its inhabitants... A sense of unease often permeates these subtly linked tales, which skillfully lay out a disorienting blueprint of modern Johannesburg." — Publishers Weekly (Starred Review)

"The writing has a quality of unpredictability, a wildness that seeps through the fabric of Vladislavic's peerless linguistic control." -- Katie Kitamatura, BOMB Magazine

"Vladislavic is without doubt the most significant writer in South Africa today." -- Focus on Africa

"Vladislavic is a rare, brilliant writer. His work eschews all cant. Its sheer verve, the way it burrows beneath ossified forms of writing, its discipline and the distance it places between itself and the jaded preoccupations of local fiction, distinguish it." -- Sunday Times

"In the tradition of Elias Canetti, a tour de force of the imagination." -- André Brink

"His stylistic virtuosity, sardonic wit, playful inventiveness, and his cool intimations of menace transmute the banal into something rich and strange loaded with comic and philosophical significance." -- Mail & Guardian Review of Books

"His art is about loosening the terrible grip of a world of dead images and opening the flow of new perceptions and fresh understanding." -- Sunday Independent

"The Folly by Ivan Vladislavić who is one of South Africa's best writers and bafflingly under appreciated. He's ripe for some big international enthusiasm by now. This is his first novel, though I only came upon it recently. In a country obsessed with social realism, Vladislavić has always tried to find less obvious ways to approach the world. An immaculately-written allegory or parable (though neither word is quite right) about two unlikely neighbours, it's a clever and elegant book that lodges in the mind like a dart." -- Damon Galgut