The Sellout

• The Sellout is a comic masterpiece, but it's much more than just that — it's one of the smartest and most honest reflections on race and identity in America in a very long time, written by an author who truly understands what it means to talk about the history of the country.

• It’s this deliberate subversion of harmful cultural assumptions that makes this daring and abrasive novel a joy to read – the furthest thing imaginable from a selling out of anyone.

• The most remarkable thing about The Sellout is that the author writes with brazenness and a desire to provoke, without worrying about his racial background. It is not a novel written from pride or an inferiority complex, but from pure audacity and wit. It is a literary offering moving between the unclassifiable and the fiercely contemporary, justly deserving of the prestigious Booker Prize.

• Quite different is the case if you are willing to let yourself be carried away by the brilliance of a blistering writing, capable of dusting off the art of satire by cloaking it in the specious compunction of an auto-da-fé that is anything but peaceful – the narrator seems to beat around the bush, but the craft of digression of which he is clearly a master serves a deadly serious examination of the racial question in today's United States.

• Its story, especially its mastery of dialogue, hits, stuns, and knocks you out, warning of the huge perils latent in those forgotten suburbs where the law of the strongest prevails, driving its characters to extreme situations and eccentric roles that nonetheless paint an impeccable portrait of current problems and contradictions.

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