The Estancia

I was reminded of Proust's Combray when reading Martin Cullen's moving and detailed evocation of a childhood spent among the sophisticated environs of Calle Juncas in central Buenos Aires and on several family estancias during the early 1950s. [...] Written in prose that is often poetic [...] The Estancia is a valuable record of a society that has now disappeared. -- Euan Cameron * Catholic Herald * As a distillation of the complex puchero stew that is Argentinian identity - culturally in thrall to Europe long after independence from Spain - The Estancia is unbeatable ... a superb meditation on memory: the past is another country ... this is an immersive, beautifully crafted novel. * The Lady * Deliciously unsettling ... the voice, whether novelist's or autobiographer's, is unforgettable. -- Jonathan Keates * The Literary Review * Estancia is a marvel of poise and the high classical style... the writing has an incisive photographic clarity...the boy Cullen is a Tintin-like anomaly in his 1920s knickerbockers and beret...taken to France by his great-aunt Tia Tiode, a character out of Graham Greene's Travels with My Aunt. -- Ian Thomson * The Tablet * use of language: rich, flexible and incisive ... Something new on every page ... in the sense of a turn of phrase, an image, an emotion cut at an unexpected angle ... a strange work of art, Freudian rococo, opera in the jungle ... a book like bottled smoke. -- Duncan Fallowell