PRAISE FOR THE DIVINER'S TALE
“Bradford Morrow's The Diviner's Tale is very much in the chilling, deeply-felt vein of Hawthorne. But its style and intelligence makes it a cut above genre fiction. Mesmerising. Bradford Morrow is a distinguished American man of letters.”
—The Independent, London
Bradford Morrow is a force of nature. I have already publicly used the word ‘masterpiece’ about one of his books, Trinity Fields. It is a measure of this writer that I must invoke the word again, and about a novel that not only contains pitch-perfect, surpassingly beautiful line-to-line writing but that finds in fictional genre forms both narrative excitement and profound human insight fully as successfully as Dostoevsky did with murder mysteries and Melville did with sea adventures. The Diviner’s Tale will not only delight, it will endure.”
—Robert Olen Butler
"Morrow...elicits frissons with gossamer descriptions of still moments that will have some readers drawing a sharp breath, as if they've heard a strange noise in the house....[S]ubtle, distinctive and well-wrought."
—The Washington Post
“The Diviner’s Tale is Bradford Morrow’s most ambitious novel to date. He deftly wicks the literary and the paranormal into a single strand, making us wonder why we ever thought of the two as separate, and then uses this thread to weave a perfectly articulated mystery. The result is a sly masterpiece by a truly marvelous stylist that will cause you to question what you thought you knew about both genre and literature. Triply satisfying, The Diviner’s Tale is a virtuoso performance.”
—Brian Evenson
"Vividly imagined. Rolling profusion of language. Literary fiction [is Morrow's] particular, individual gift."
—The New York Times Book Review
“Bradford Morrow, like the diviner-heroine of The Diviner’s Tale, is a mesmerizing storyteller who casts an irresistible spell. He has constructed an ingeniously plotted mystery story that is at the same time a love story—luminous and magical, fraught with suspense, beautifully and subtly rendered—a feat of prose divination.”
—Joyce Carol Oates
"I finished Bradford Morrow's The Diviner's Tale over the weekend, galloping through the last third of the book with gooseflesh on my arms, completely spellbound by this cut-above-the-rest literary ghost story....Spooky as hell, beautifully written, tight as a tripwire, The Diviner's Tale isn't quite like any ghost story I've read before. Morrow's prose is lush and eccentric and beautiful, somewhere between Bradbury and Kerouac at times, and his characters are superbly realized and gloriously imperfect."
—Corey Doctorow, BoingBoing.net
“Superb. The only thing I did for two straight days was read this book—it really is that riveting. It reminded me of the greatest Hitchcock films that were somehow alchemically able to combine suspense, wonder, and romance all in one seamless story that kept you guessing and gasping right up until the end. A long time fan of Morrow’s work, I can honestly say this is the best he’s ever done.”
—Jonathan Carroll
"Morrow loves to play with multiple meanings of words; he has also seasoned this splendidly written mystery with evanescent snippets of observed nature and wrapped it in a compelling story. Grade: A"
—Cleveland Plain Dealer
"Here begins a haunting story filled with a creeping, fearful dread that seeps off the page and into your heart....delicate, precise prose…. The dénouement could not be more unexpected."
—The Daily Mail, London
"Proffers an elegiac glimpse of a vanishing world."
—Chronogram
“In his sublime new novel The Diviner’s Tale, Bradford Morrow accomplishes the deep, subtle miracle I have been waiting and waiting for someone to effect—he gives us the first novel-length work of fiction that actually does create a seamless breathing breathtaking unity of the literary and the suspense novel. This novel detonates the very notion of genre. And it works because it is riveting, insightful, sentence by sentence charged with feeling, as it bears us helpless with it on its downward journey to illumination.”
—Peter Straub
“An astonishing dark gem of a novel, The Diviner's Tale is a gorgeously written, deeply unsettling thriller that kept me reading long past my bedtime for three nights in a row. I don't regret a moment of it, and neither will you — I loved this book.”
—Elizabeth Hand
"In addition to scaring the daylights out of us, The Diviner's Tale stands up for the offbeat and unconventional in human nature, though ironically the novel becomes progressively more conventional as it makes its case."
—The Boston Globe
“Bradford Morrow’s The Diviner’s Tale packs a mighty emotional wallop. This haunting portrayal of a woman possessed by irresistible visions which draw her through mystery and terror to cataclysmic self-discovery is both chilling and impossible to put down. Morrow is at the top of his form: bold, original, and mesmerizing. Truly a stunning achievement.”
—Valerie Martin
“Bradford Morrow's beautifully written and tautly paced novel brings the old and all but forgotten gift of divination into the modern world. With the aptly named but thoroughly contemporary Cassandra as the book's flawlessly rendered voice, Morrow has created a woman both heroic in what she seeks and human in what she finds. The Diviner's Tale is about past crimes and future consequences, a tale whose subtle and mysterious confluences are as elusive as water underground.”