"Karin Tidbeck's Amatka is a stunning, truly original exploration of the mysteries of reality and what it means to be human. It's brutally honest and uncompromising in its vision - a brilliant short story writer has been revealed as an even more brilliant novelist. One of my favorite reads of the past few years, an instant classic." (Jeff VanderMeer, author of the Southern Reach trilogy)

"Tidbeck reimagines reality and the power of language in her dystopian sci-fi novel...Tidbeck introduces the mysteries and mechanics of her world slowly while leaving the origins of these pioneers opaque. Her ending takes a turn into much weirder territory, but her tense plotting, as well as the questions she raises about language, control, and human limits make this a very welcome speculative fiction novel." (Publishers Weekly)

"Karin Tidbeck is a brilliant conjurer of worlds, a fabulist armed with an imagination as fiercely strange as any I have ever encountered. Her fiction is built on a foundation of improbabilities and even outright impossibilities, and if you surrender to its increasingly bold claims on reality you will walk away surprised, thrilled, and in all likelihood changed forever." (Matt Bell, author of Scrapper)