The Carcass Remover

'The Carcass Remover is a baleful comet burning across Europe trailing fire and ice, what is desired and what is damned. You know it to be witness, and you can only hope it isn't prophecy. In Robinson Jeffers' words beauty is not always lovely and this is not a lovely book but it is beautiful and necessary. A stunning piece of work.' Eoin McNamee

'A very significant and mature talent. ... With his outstanding prose, ... through his meticulously crafted, patiently objective style, he makes a direct and daring step.' Peter Nadas

'War brutalizes. In Zoltan Danyi's excellently translated The Carcass Remover a man drifts between Serbia and Hungary through postwar geographies of physical and psychological wreckage. The book is held together by what is constantly tearing it apart.' George Szirtes

'The spiral of war coils around the protagonist's life ... becoming grotesque, obscene, and even absurd. There is no way out for the one who has fallen into war.' Noemi Kiss

'Zoltan Danyi's irate first novel The Carcass Remover is a literary event that has reached far beyond the borders of Hungary. ... Beneath every surface lies a sinister depth, and it is into these that Danyi mercilessly shines his light. A gaze one has to endure. He is a first-class novelist; above all, however, he offers us an urgent challenge in the face of Europe's breakdown.' Neue Zurcher Zeitung

'The Carcass Remover is a perfect book of paradoxical beauty that deals with the ugly within us.' Suddeutsche Zeitung

'The great success of The Carcass Remover is not entirely down to its aesthetic quality, but also its shocking timeliness, the permanent contemporary nature of history, its continual return, the death of culture, of humanity, of the myth of Europe. The fact that here and now we are also living in wartime.' Orsolya Bencsik, Muut

'The beauty of the language with which a manic narrator wrestles his demons, chapter after chapter, is astonishing.' Literatur Spiegel