"Nothing short of amazing."   
   Entertainment Weekly (Editor's Choice)

"Throughout this rich, complex and haunting novel, Horn reminds us that our world poses constant threats to the artist and to art, to the individual and the creative spirit. Their very survival is a miracle."
    New York Times Book Review (Editor's Choice)

"A deeply satisfying literary mystery and a funny-sad meditation on how the past haunts the present—and how we haunt the future."
    Time Magazine

"Piercingly beautiful... delightful and often funny... Almost romantic, almost tragic,  almost comic, almost mystical -- the novel suspends us between emotions, never allowing any to become predominant, and we hang there in that indeterminate space, perfectly happy, hoping that the book will never end."
   Newsday

"Captivating and startling... miraculously, it stays aloft in the mind like a dream you can't decide was sweet or frightening."
  The Washington Post

"A deeply involving tale, a family saga and a mystery... brilliantly imagined... The novel may sound over-ambitious -- pogrom and privation, familial and romantic love, life after death (and before), not to mention high art and quiz shows.  And yet it all seems to work -- beautifully."
  The Wall Street Journal

"Isn't there a Willy Wonka gum that tastes like all good foods at once? If so, Dara Horn's "The World to Come" is the literary equivalent of that confection, equal parts mystery, sprawling novel, folktale, philosophical treatise, history, biography, love story and fabulist adventure... each page of her novel is a marvel."
  The San Francisco Chronicle (Editor's Recommendation)

"Compelling and luxuriously layered... perfectly paced... wryly funny... an accomplished work that beautifully explains how families -- in all their maddening, smothering, supportive glory -- create us."
   Los Angeles Times

"Horn's roving, kinetic imagination and storytelling talent are on abundant display here, and there's no question that this book is the real thing."
   Chicago Tribune

"Oh, what a story... a lament for what has been lost and an invitation to seek out what remains."
  Detroit Free Press

"Horn’s prose sallies along with confidence and intensity, sometimes to the point of whimsy, which means that the novel is, by turns, profoundly bleak and fantastically sweet...  The World to Come is the stuff of dreams, enchanting and daring ... [Horn] has a spiritual and moral intuition that transcends most of her contemporaries. This is no mean feat — especially since she combines it with a flair for fantastical storytelling."
  The Times of London

"Horn, a ridiculously accomplished novelist for a 29-year-old, takes the real-life disappearance of the Chagall as the framework for this outstanding, ethereal second novel ... What she has to say about what truly matters in life - what is real versus what is fake, what we choose to remember versus what we forget - is nothing short of inspirational."
  The Observer (U.K.)

"Just when all the stories were heading towards their resolution, Horn does something so bold and so pure that to describe it would spoil it.  All I can say is that you have to read it."
  The Guardian (U.K.)

"Like Chagall's paintings, the novel is steeped in Jewish Russian folklore. Warm and humorous, it is also drenched in the melancholy that attaches itself to the history of 19th and 20th century Jewish
culture. Underpinned by exquisite reflections on loss, beauty and identity, it is perhaps one of the most outstanding novels published so far this year."
  Financial Times

"Spellbinding . . . A compelling collage of history, mystery, theology, and scripture, The World to Come is a narrative tour de force crackling with conundrums and dark truths."
    Booklist (*Starred Review*)

"[The World to Come] reads like a dynamic hybrid of Nicole Krauss's The History of Love and Milan Kundera's philosophical flights of fancy.  . . .  This is intelligent, compelling literary fiction." 
    Library Journal

"With surety and accomplishment, [Dara] Horn telescopes out into familial history through an exploration of Chagall's life; that of Chagall's friend the Yiddish novelist Der Nister; 1920s Soviet Russia and its horrific toll on Russian Jews; the nullifying brutality of Vietnam and the paradoxes of American suburbia.  Horn expertly handles subplots and digressions, neatly bringing in everything from Yiddish lore to Nebuchadnezzar, Da Nang, the Venice Biennale, recent theories of child development, brutal Soviet politics and [Ben's] job as a writer for fictional TV show American Genius . . . . which Horn then unites with a much grander place that
furnishes the book's title."
    Publishers Weekly (*Starred Review*)

"An engrossing adventure."
    Kirkus Reviews

"I can't even count the ways I admire The World to Come -- everything about the book intoxicated me.  It is quite simply an astonishing achievement, and Dara Horn is the realist of real things.  I suspect it'll be a long while before I again read a book as true as The World to Come."
    Steve Stern, author of The Angel of Forgetfulness

"Like a spider weaving her web -- miraculously -- Dara Horn weaves the poignant stories of lives past, lives present, and lives to come in this splendid tale of storytelling itself.  A terrific yarn peopled with tender and very human characters, a page-turning mystery of the best sort: not who done it, but why."
    Binnie Kirshenbaum, author of An Almost Perfect Moment

"Some excellent books are smart and serious; others are sweet and joyous.  Amazingly, Dara Horn's The World to Come is all of the above.  Ms. Horn hits every note in the literary register from historical tragedy to mystical delirium, and plays them like a master."
    Melvin Jules Bukiet, author of Strange Fire and A Faker's Dozen