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Inglorious Reviews
... An extraordinary journey from the ordinary into the epic...A great writer who I have no doubt will be read long after I am gone...
Shami Chakrabarti
Wonderful...The anguish is relieved by crisp, pitch-perfect prose and a hilarious dry wit...
Suzi Feay, Independent on Sunday
A successful London journalist who is mourning her mother’s death suddenly quits her job, then finds herself homeless when her lover leaves. Staying with friends, unable to find work, she makes endless lists in a search for meaning in this elegantly written novel.
Elsa Dixler, New York Times
Kavenna precisely captures the mixture of superiority and self-pity with which Rosa justifies her failure to act. Days pass in a dull blur of writing lists: "Clean the kitchen. Read the works of Proust...", scrounging meals and brooding about death. It is all very funny, and very dark. Rosa's extreme solipsism does not prevent her from some sharp observations on the absurdities of modern life. Best of all are the descriptions of London, which comes across in all its seedy glory; although a comically disastrous visit to friends in the Lake District is also well worth the price of entry.
Christina Koning, The Times (London)
Our heroine is fighting a terrible enemy: her "inner blah." But the verb "fighting" is not quite right, because the struggle depicted by British author Joanna Kavenna in her quirky novel "Inglorious" (Picador), recently released in paperback, is not that active. It's more of a dull slide than a vigorous skirmish. Yet Rosa Lane, the protagonist of this oddly compelling story about a young woman's tumble into torpor after losing her job, her boyfriend and perhaps her sanity, retains the ability to pick through her memories and retrieve telling treasures.
Julia Keller, Chicago Tribune
A superb piece of writing, and a disturbing, witty commentary on modern life.
Kate Saunders, London Times
Wry and coolly lyrical, Inglorious...has a compellingly anarchic energy, propelling the reader through a vividly realised landscape of contemporary angst and hinting at light at the end of the tunnel.
Hephzibah Anderson, Observer
This journey into a nervous breakdown is described with such relish and mordant humour that it remains as gripping as many more epic voyages....Rosa is subject to flights of ideas and associative thinking; while her life stalls, her mind soars. The wordplay is her defence against the threat of extinction, the looming terror of "the snuffing out of me!"...Sly, self-deprecating wit.
Olivia Laing, Guardian
Joanna Kavenna's first novel, "Inglorious" (following her widely acclaimed nonfiction debut, "The Ice Museum"), is a trip worth taking. It's the intellectual wit and Kavenna's Woolfian eye for the universe-in-a-single-detail that save the novel from the hair-tearing emotional excess and sentimentality so many nervous-breakdown stories suffer from....A lovely and wrenching novel...
Tara Ison, LA Times
Vulnerable, perspicacious, funny, literate, Rosa is an unforgettable narrator, stumbling around on borrowed heels, musing on Heraclitean notions of flux. Her tone lies somewhere between those of Bridget Jones and Philip Larkin. Kavenna writes with great elegance and has a delicious grasp of comic bathos...the quality of the prose never dips.
Tom Fleming, The Spectator
Kavenna’s understanding of the complexity of depression and her evocation of her heroine’s bewilderment are precise, and Rosa, for all her misery, has an appealing and often funny voice.
New Yorker
Fierce intelligence...Kavenna writes beautifully as she traverses daydream, dreamscape and nightmare. [Such] elegant treatment of the frequent unfamiliarity of modern life...
Rose Jacobs, Financial Times
Kavenna has nailed Rosa precisely, imbuing her distress with a dark hopeless humour that surfaces in her undoable to-do lists...and caustic self-awareness. Her skewed world-view casts a troubling, penetrating and often funny gaze on middle-class values.
Lisa Gee, Independent
Clear-sighted, intelligent, provocative, rewarding for Kavenna’s precise apprehension and arresting imagery...Reflects Rosa’s own uncertain existence with a succinct beauty.
James Urquhart, Sunday Telegraph
Rosa is like a female version of Withnail, and her failures in the face of her peers' successes make her story a modern spin on Gissing's New Grub Street.
Elena Seymenliyska, Telegraph
If Franz Kafka had lived in the early 21st century and been female, English and a bit cheekier, he might have produced a work like Joanna Kavenna's delightful debut novel, which follows her prize-winning nonfiction book "The Ice Museum." Rosa's jaundiced, witty, slightly paranoid view of her world and the rather unpleasant people who inhabit it prove oddly charming.
Rebecca Oppenheimer, LifeTimes
A horribly funny, surprisingly jaunty visit to the edge of the abyss
Kirkus