“Sex and psychosis are indistinguishable in this killer new novel from Ducornet. . . . As fascinating as it is dirty and dark.”
—Publishers Weekly, starred review
“Ducornet is a novelist of ambition and scope. One is grateful for what she’s accomplished here.”
—The New York Times
“Ducornet’s new book tenaciously plums the tension between impulse and restraint.”
—American Book Review
“An enticing, fast-moving exploration of one man’s obsession with his calculated power and unhinged desires.”
—Booklist
“Ms. Ducornet writes with velocity, immediacy, and impact. It only takes a few pages to be caught up in the mind of the doctor.”
—New York Journal of Books
“Written in lyrical, sensuous prose, as if shrouded in a fog of humidity, Netsuke emerges as a character study of a man in crisis.”
—The Seattle Times
“Ducornet has the extraordinary ability to compress an explosive tale of violence and repression in a small, tight container.”
—Rain Taxi
"Netsuke is a testament to Ducornet’s ever evolving, ever relevant, and simply compelling ability to tell a story. It’s well-suited for this era so defined by its shades of gray.”
—KGB Bar Lit Journal
“Netsuke has teeth and claws. It isn’t a comfortable book for a reader to inhabit, and yet it has important things to say, embedded in the deadly beautiful prose.”
—Jeff Vandermeer
“Readers will pick up pages of painful beauty and calamitous memory, and their focus will be like a burning glass; its examination of a ruinous sexual life is as delicate and sharp as a surgeon's knife.”
—William Gass
“Netsuke, a short novel that seethes with dark energy and sinister eroticism, still has power to shock, maybe even to appall."
—The Boston Globe
“Netsuke is a little masterpiece, a gem of a psychological novel.”
—Lisa Guidarini, NBCC
“[Ducornet] exposes life’s harshest truths with a mesmeric delicacy and holds her readers spellbound.”
—Joanna Scott
“There is the time before you open Rikki Ducornet’s Netsuke and then there is only the time in which you are reading—a searing present of heart-swallowing secrets, warped eroticism, betrayals, and insight trellised against the page in nightshade-gorgeous prose.”
—Forrest Gander
