Praise for After the Sun

How does it feel to be a native of the digital era? What effect does late capitalism have upon our intimate lives? A lot of people instinctively sense that time and space feel different these days, but few people seem able to capture that feeling in prose. Jonas Eika manages it. After the Sun is an inventive and exciting book – a true original

– Zadie Smith

Eika’s prose flexes a light-footed, vigilant, and unpredictable animalism: it’s practically pantheresque. After the Sun is an electrifying, utterly original read

– Claire-Louise Bennett

Eika says he ‘started writing this book wanting to be surprised by it’ and it delivers: this is a book that is hard to get out of your head, like an extravagant dream

– The Guardian

Relentlessly thrilling. The sentences in these stories stretch past the limits of the ordinary to the luridly extraordinary, and some moments feel as if they are breaking through to the sublime

– New York Times Book Review

After the Sun confronts modernity and alienation in hypnotic prose... These stories are compelling, haunted, even radiant

– TLS

Eika deftly exposes the absurdity and harm of class, capitalism, and global oppressive structures through glimpses into the lives of a wide range of characters and the way they do or do not cultivate connection or community… Utterly refreshing

– BOMB Magazine

After the Sun reads a bit like Thomas Pynchon taking on late capitalism. The writing is surrealistic, granular in its details, and concerned with social entropy and desperate attempts at communion… In a translation of unsettling intensity by Sherilyn Nicolette Hellberg, the stories derive much of their force from their insistence on transformation. Not only do the settings and characters abruptly alter, as in a dream, but the mood can instantly switch from light to dark

– Wall Street Journal

If one were to combine the deadpan eeriness of Yorgos Lanthimos, the campy yet grotesque body horror of David Cronenberg, and the Dada-infused homoeroticism of William Burroughs, the end result would look something like After the Sun… The effect is bewitching

– Seattle Times

Political fictions aren’t supposed to be this personal. Satires aren’t supposed to be this heartbreaking. Surrealism isn’t supposed to be this real. Giving a damn isn’t supposed to be this fun. From slights of hand, to shocks to the heart, After the Sun is doing all the things you don’t expect it to and leaving a big bold mark in what we call literature

– Marlon James

Jonas Eika blew the doors and windows of my imagination open, and now there is a galaxy in my head and a supernova in my heart. After the Sun vibrates with the aftershock of capitalism and reality flux. Its characters confront the world we’ve made as if they are facing off with ex-lovers who won’t leave, caught at the instant before they will either flame on or flame out. Thrilling

– Lidia Yuknavitch

Striking literary craftsmanship in an ex- perimental mix of shock-lit, sci-fi, dada and Joycean glints presented as loose time scenes that slide in and out like cards in the hands of the shuffler. By the end, this reader had the impression of having been drawn through a keyhole

– Annie Proulx

Whether it is young men caught up in the exploitative servility of the sun, sex and sand industry in ‘Bad Mexican Dog’, the self-intoxicating cynicism of the futures traders in ‘Alvin’, or the cosmic xenophobia of UFO enthusiasts in ‘Rachel, Nevada’, the writer is closely attuned to the ways in which only fiction can capture the strange fusion of sentimental fantasy and commercial brutality in our contemporary moment

– The Irish Times

Utterly brilliant and occasionally confounding, these strange stories catch like fishhooks into the reader’s nervous system. Difficult and mesmerizing, the stories range from formally formidable to downright mind-melting in their creative disregard for convention

– Kirkus Reviews

Eika holds nothing back in his fiction, he goes into the tightest of spaces and most intimate and terrifying of moments in order to break through to places few have been before – or even imagined existing

–Refinery29

Studded with shockingly visceral images, these lyrical stories are preoccupied with a sense of psychosexual loneliness that penetrates even the most absurd moments of escapism. Eika’s fusing of the magic realist mode with the alienation of modernity makes for a winning formula

– Publishers Weekly

After the Sun has surprised and enthralled the jury with its global perspective, its sensual and imaginative language, and its ability to speak about contemporary political challenges without the reader feeling in any way directed to a certain place… There is a real sense of poetic magic. Reality opens into other possibilities; other dimensions. There is something wonderful and hopeful in it that reminds us how literature can do more than just mirror what we already know

– The Jury of the Nordic Council Literature Prize

In Sherilyn Hellberg’s translation, these stories are by turns lyrical and brutal, ultra-realistic and fantastical. They penetrate layers of life and experience in rhythms that are both full of music and full of horror, showing the reader an underside to our modern, globalised world

– Lunate