‘Few recent works of fiction in any genre have touched on the vagaries of life, love, and art more movingly or with deeper understanding. An intoxicating, deeply affecting novel by the influential fantasist.’ — Kirkus (Starred Review)

‘A compulsively readable, introspective tale about the road not taken.. At its heart, this is an arresting and imaginative meditation on life. Perfect for fans of magical realism with a free-flowing style like that of David Mitchell and Toshikazu Kawaguchi.’ — Library Journal

‘As always with the exceptionally imaginative Carroll, he creates complex worlds for his hero to inhabit and with clever crossovers between realms that are carefully thought out and fun to explore. Carroll’s attention to details is impressive, and the unexpected prevails.’ — Booklist

‘[Carroll] has been winning awards for his elegantly spooky magical-realist fantasies since his 1980 debut, The Land of Laughs. His first novel since 2014 plays with ideas about fate, choice, art and love… Every bit as inventive and engaging as the best of his earlier novels, and still with a sinister edge, this is more dream than nightmare, and a pure delight to read.’ — Guardian

‘Dazzlingly original (it’s Jonathan Carroll, so no surprise there), slyly funny in places, thoughtfully and cleverly rendered, MR. BREAKFAST is an exhilarating and moving meditation on how we deduce what matters most.’ — Amazon Best Books of January 2023

‘MR BREAKFAST is worth the wait… a tale of regret and reincarnation, of second chances arriving perhaps too late. Its narrative strands are folded inside one another and the whole thing is couched in pristine prose. To Carroll, the mundane can yield unexpected delight and danger, making everyday lives fascinating.’ — Financial Times (Best New Science Fiction of January 2023)

‘Like Murakami, Brian Eno, or David Lynch, Jonathan Carroll is entirely sui generis, someone whose work is so fresh, weird, and original, it stands in a class of its own. Maybe the most striking thing about this lean, remarkable novel is Carroll’s caffeinated curiosity about everything, his roving eye for everyday wonders, for the effervescent in the banal. MR. BREAKFAST is a small book of big ideas, a set of Russian nesting dolls with an entire universe glowing at the centre.’ — Joe Hill, bestselling author of Horns, NOS4A2, and Netflix’s recent Locke and Key

‘Reading Jonathan Carroll, one thinks of a blind person stroking a drugged tiger – an experience that is sensuous, dreamy, and dangerous all at once. And then, of course, the tiger wakes up.’ — Bruce Wagner, novelist and screenwriter

‘… unique mixture of the mundane and the metaphysical… sudden time shifts, the nostalgic landscapes of middle America, mysterious tutelary figures, encounters with earlier selves, photographs and tattoos, and, inevitably, very ingratiating dogs. It even includes some subtle allusions to his own earlier work. By any measure, this is vintage Carroll, which is another way of saying it’s entirely new… the sense of infinite possibility – which after all is the main appeal of Road Not Taken stories – is exhilarating, even through the novel’s somber, sad, or occasionally sentimental moments.’ — Locus (Gary K. Wolfe)

‘[A]nother winner from one of our best fabulists… Carroll is compared with Haruki Murakami almost as often as he’s called a writer’s writer, but the comparison makes intuitive sense. Like Murakami, Carroll is a magical realist, rather than a systematizer or a worldbuilder: The rules of magic and the logic of the supernatural matter less than the mysteries of the heart… I read MR BREAKFAST in three enthralled sittings… The novel thrilled me; it made me reflect on art, love, choices, and regrets; it left me with tears in the corners of my eyes and a smile on my face. What more can a reader ask for? Jonathan Carroll is too good to ever stop being a writer’s writer, but I hope that MR BREAKFAST will make him a reader’s writer too. There are thousands of people who would love this book. I hope they all find it.’ — Tor.com

‘MR BREAKFAST is a tale of regret and reincarnation, of second chances arriving perhaps too late. Its narrative strands are folded inside one another and the whole thing is couched in pristine prose. To [Jonathan] Carroll, the mundane can yield unexpected delight and danger, making everyday lives fascinating.’ — Financial Times

‘MR BREAKFAST is ultimately a novel about happiness and all the ways we find it elusive…. Every time I put the novel down, I thought about what I would do, finding it difficult to imagine I might not succumb to any curiosity at all about how my alternate lives might have been. I think I’d be too tempted, though that says more about me than it does about the circumstances of my life…. I wanted to know more at every turn, yet I entirely trusted the writer to tell me all I needed. That sense of needing more is always a key litmus test of any novel for me, and MR BREAKFAST passed easily. Carroll keeps the focus tightly on his main character in a way that leaves us wistful for whatever’s around the narrative corner and mirrors the way we move through our lives, only knowing a fraction of the stories around us… a key question of the novel is why it is Graham Patterson who gets to have this option to completely change his life and not anyone else. Although we may have our doubts, he’s repeatedly told it’s because he chose that tattoo and no other. A random choice led him to have these remarkable experiences. To me, this was such a cunning artistic choice because isn’t that what we’re all afraid of? Not that we make the wrong call on the obvious big things: what career, what house, what spouse; but more that we could be living an entirely different reality if one day twelve years ago, we’d gone into one train carriage rather than another. That random, apparently inconsequential choices braid together to make up the fabric of our lives, and we will never be able to unpick any of it.’ — BSFA

‘Quick with a label, critics have called Carroll a magic realist, a slipstream novelist, a writer of supernatural thrillers and the creator of modern fairy tales. He does check all these boxes, while remaining elegantly sui generis. His prose is spare, polished and quick-moving, sometimes lightly comic, always immensely engaging. At the same time, his plots — including that of his new novel, MR BREAKFAST — depict the abrupt irruption of the uncanny and terrifying into our familiar workaday world… MR BREAKFAST is the first Carroll novel in several years, but it seems to me as masterly as his earlier books. It will surprise you, make you laugh and scare you — and then, just when you think it’s over, add several extra twists before bringing this Rubik’s Cube of a story to just the right, emotionally muted conclusion.’ — Washington Post

‘Over the course of 20 novels, Jonathan Carroll has become internationally renowned for establishing a singular vision and style — a highly imaginative, genre-crossing, and wonder-fueled approach to crafting memorable characters and building extraordinary worlds. Carroll’s prose, which has earned a Pushcart Prize, two French Fantasy Awards, a Bram Stoker Award, and a World Fantasy Award, doesn’t just stick with you long after you put down his books. It imprints deep into your psyche, amplifying the beauty and absurdity of everyday life while highlighting the metaphysical in the seemingly mundane.’ — LA Review of Books

‘Jonathan Carroll’s MR. BREAKFAST is… entertaining and thought-provoking. We meet Graham Patterson at an inflection point, having just turned his back on a loving relationship because he’s afraid of having children and abandoned his faltering stand-up comedy career… Carroll eventually settles in and does a good job of raising the stakes for Graham in each new scenario, building suspense as Graham feels the weight of his actions.’ — Boston Globe

‘Sharing the DNA of movies like Sliding Doors and The Weatherman, Jonathan Carroll’s latest novel is a cinematic exploration of nostalgia, regret and self-reflection… a tender work of literary fantasy; absorbing and provocative, yet free from the cynicism of a Hollywood redemption arc. MR BREAKFAST is a charming and thoughtful tale, an introspection on reckoning with the choices you make and how they can weigh and balance with personal values and the many opportunities life brings.’ — SciFi Now

‘… this is a superior fantasy novel. Here, you truly feel for Graham and even for the characters who appear to want to do him harm. The humanity of the entire cast shines through… MR. BREAKFAST is a fun read — and one that just might make you wistful for your own road not taken.’ — Washington Independent Review of Books

‘Carroll is the master of the woozy stumble and sway as reality uncoils. He has been compared to David Lynch, which is understandable: there is often a bright surface, with something strange and troubling beneath; his work defies easy explanation, much less summation; secrets may be revealed, but never provide easy answers… Carroll’s prose is clean, often elegant, always vivid. There is a general sense that something unexpected – though not necessarily malevolent – lurks around the next corner, or beyond the next paragraph… The denouement is moving, subtle, quieter than the preceding pages… an introspective work, about examining one’s life and understanding what, and who, is important in it.’ — Interzone

‘Carroll works comfortably and confidently within his fantasy and simply tells a good story. MR BREAKFAST is about the choices we make, but Carroll also avoids both the too simplistic and the too moralizing, making for a fiction that is a cut above the usual efforts at this kind of thing (à la Marc Levy). Enjoyable and satisfying.’ — Complete Review

‘Carroll’s tale of choices and consequences is fascinating. I read it all in one day because I needed to know what Graham would ultimately choose.’ — Cosmic Circus

‘Amazing, perplexing, and unforgettable. A magical world that forces the reader to put aside his own and live only in wonder.’ — Stanislaw Lem

‘An extraordinary writer… Jonathan Carroll is a cult waiting to happen.’ — Pat Conroy

‘I love Jonathan Carroll’s books. They are as surprising and delightful as Rottweiler puppies — and they bite, too.’ — Audrey Niffenegger

‘Jonathan Carroll is a master of sunlit surrealism — his beguiling, impossible novels are like Frank Capra films torn open to reveal the Philip K. Dick or Julio Cortázar mechanisms ticking away at their cores.’ — Jonathan Lethem

‘Carroll is one of my heroes. For the freedom he gives himself to crowd his pages with imagined and observed reality, cheek to jowl. For his readiness to be silly right after he’s broken your heart. He’s really created a unique style — sexy, playful, and mordant all at once.’ — Jonathan Lethem (again)

‘Carroll’s work is unlike any other’s. When you start one of his novels or short stories, your every instinct is going to lead you in the wrong direction — sooner rather than later, the book or story is going to turn itself inside out and leave you gasping.’ — Peter Straub

‘Carroll specializes in a difficult-to-label melding of emotionally acute realism with varying degrees of the fantastic… there’s no one else like him, and a Jonathan Carroll novel is always that rarest of reading experiences: a genuine surprise, filled with wonder, and apt to change how you look at the world… One of the key defining aspects of Carroll’s work is its heart, the powerful empathy one experiences within his fiction…’ — National Post

‘Reading Jonathan Carroll, one thinks of a blind person stroking a drugged tiger — an experience that is sensuous, dreamy, and dangerous all at once. And then, of course, the tiger wakes up.’ — Bruce Wagner

‘Jonathan Carroll is far superior to most writers working today, anywhere. His perceptive, death-haunted tales are so evocative, and unforgettable, that after reading them it’s hard not to imagine that the events described did not happen to you.’ — SPIN Magazine

‘I envy anyone who has yet to enjoy the sexy, eerie, and addictive novels of Jonathan Carroll. They are delicious treats — with devilish tricks inside them.’ — Washington Post

‘Smooth and fetchingly inventive.’ — Kirkus Reviews

‘If you ever read another book in your life, it should be THE LAND OF LAUGHS.’ — SF Site

‘For the uninitiated, The Land of Laughs is the perfect place to begin the darkly fantastical journey through the fiction of Jonathan Carroll. Few will be disappointed.’ — Cemetery Dance

‘BONES OF THE MOON is chilling and no one has ever written a book quite like it…’ — Pat Conroy

‘A gorgeous, frightening, imaginative, loving, unsettling, funny, gruesome, thought-provoking novel. This grand book is a triumph.’ — Stephen King

‘Amazing, perplexing, and unforgettable. A magical world that forces the reader to put aside his own and live only in wonder.’ — Stanislaw Lem

‘One of the key defining aspects of Carroll’s work is its heart, the powerful empathy one experiences within his fiction. Clearly, that’s a result of how he sees the world. THE CROW’S DINNER is rich in stories of senior citizens in cafes, of homeless kids in parks, of facades breaking down for the barest of moments, witnessed only by Carroll. It is a world of night streets, of failed love affairs, of mysterious shops and the magic of snow… THE CROW’S DINNER is a rich feast, and one which should not be consumed whole. This is not a book for a single, concerted, cover-to-cover read. Rather, it should be picked up, and opened at random. Read a piece or two, and then put the book down, and go out into the world with new eyes. For just a moment, find the wonder in the faces and lives of others. If the world is going to be too much with us, we can at least change the terms of our engagement.’ — National Post

‘I always look forward to a new book by Jonathan Carroll — his work is consistently witty, compassionate and astounding, and GLASS SOUP is no exception. It is a tender, funny love story, both madcap and darkly metaphysical: a singular creation that further adds to the fabulous Carroll oeuvre.’ — Dan Chaon

‘An ambitious retelling of the cosmic struggle between good and evil… make Carrol’s latest a delicious dish… This is a marvelous comic feast.’ — Publishers Weekly

‘The plausibly surreal GLASS SOUP provides more proof Carroll is as marvelous a writer as you’ll find in this life or any other.’ — Cinefantastique

‘GLASS SOUP is a wonder-story rich and complete in its own right, but fans will be interested to know that it also serves as a sequel to the tale of Vincent Ettrich and his beloved Isabelle Neukor, continuing the modern-day Orpheus tale begun in White Apples. Carroll’s flights of imagination seem boundless, but, amazingly, his ambitious themes and hallucinatory landscape don’t get the better of this tightly plotted, beautifully written story. This may be his best work yet.’ — The Ruminator

‘[Carroll] has a high reputation in literary SF and fantasy circles. This collection of 20 pieces of his short fiction suggests that it is well deserved. He has a conspicuous knack for giving new dimensions to venerable themes… Carroll’s stories are tightly focused, with hardly an ill-chosen or misplaced word. They are distinguished by a powerfully haunting quality that derives from a deceptively simple combination of fantastic events related in the easy voice of a raconteur telling simple anecdotes.’ — Publishers Weekly