Affecting, carefully drafted, quietly tumultuous.

A slow-burn literary take on the missing-person whydunit, capturing how people chatter their way down alleys, rarely hewing to the main road of a tale.

Given that so many of Buckley’s novels are concerned with ideas of memory, selfhood and storytelling, this is hardly new territory for him. Yet the interview conceit in Tell makes it feel fresh, the withholding of interiority requiring an unusual engagement. Don’t take the conversational prose at face value; underneath it lies a whole other set of mysteries besides Curtis’s. Pay attention and you’ll find them.

[Buckley] asks readers to think about how and why stories are told. This self-reflexivity results in a thought-provoking, artfully constructed narrative enriched by the mysteries that expand and proliferate throughout. It’s a deliciously fraught tour de force.

Suspicions, resentments, mutual desires, obscure liaisons, bad habits—they bristle among the familial characters, estate staff, and interlopers… In the end, this is a novel about narrativity, how to tell and why we tell—made riveting by Buckley’s canniness.

A finely honed and richly pleasurable illumination not only of the privileges and pitfalls of elites but also of universally human quirks and longings.

There’s plenty of interest in the life of Curtis, a British tycoon and art collector who’s gone missing. A novel about the nature of storytelling, and who gets to tell and shape the story.

Exactly why Buckley is not already revered and renowned as a novelist in the great European tradition remains a mystery that will perhaps only be addressed at that final godly hour when all the overlooked authors working in odd and antique modes will receive their just rewards.

Buckley’s fiction is subtle and fastidiously low-key...every apparently loose thread, when tugged, reveals itself to be woven into the themes [and] gets better the more you allow it to settle in your mind.

Few writers manage to conjure such raw unease as Jonathan Buckley ... completely compelling.

Why isn’t Jonathan Buckley better known?

A quietly brilliant writer, almost eccentric in his craftsmanship.

An exceptional talent.

Buckley has once again staged an absorbing debate: a philosophical refusal of narrative linearity that is replete with stories; a constellation of episodes that does not tell the whole tale.