★ “A memorable read... Music and the sacred converge in unexpected ways. Keenan explores that dynamic through a story about a father, a daughter, and the music that haunts them.”—Kirkus Reviews (Starred Review)
★ “A philosophical, poetic novel... An open conversation about music and art that explores the meanings and interrelationship of synchronicity, significance, memories, mercy, and grace... The Russian soul and its attendant angst are well explored in this short novel.”—Library Journal (Starred Review)
★ “A daring experiment that questions what fiction can and should be.”—Shelf Awareness (Starred Review)
“This book spoke, it said ‘read me’ from the very first sentence as if it were alive, it gave me visceral joy.”—Kim Gordon
“Reading Xstabeth feels like being cut open to the accompanying sound of ecstatic music.”—Edna O’Brien, author of Girl
“Prepare for more of that inimitable Keenan narrative voodoo brilliance.”—Wendy Erskine, author of Sweet Home
“Absolutely unique.”—Booklist
“[Xstabeth] will shock and delight, confuse and inspire, all in a manner that truly elevates the form.”—Publishers Weekly
“A strange, ambitious book... Xstabeth is the story of a father and daughter, of memory, space, philosophizing, sex, golf, saints, fairies, more sex, Leonard Cohen, a secret band, life as performance, and, maybe most of all, music and musicality. Xstabeth is the ornate key to a lock you didn't know you were looking for (but now cannot imagine not finding).”—Jeremy Garber, Powell’s Books (Portland, OR)
“You can lose yourself in the novel’s weird loops and whorls, searching for resolution while luxuriating in the lack of it... There’s something here of the 19th-century Russian novelists’ passion for authenticity, their fervid drama... The sense of a synchronous world being created even as you read, where past visions spark memories that echo the present, leaping across synaptic gaps with the grace of a bird in flight.”—The Guardian
“‘A genre of one.’ The same might be said of this gloriously sui generis novel.”—Financial Times
“It is one of the most interesting novels I've come across this year. Reading it, I felt the unmistakable pulse of something living, and it isn't done with me yet.”—Literary Review
“One of the most exciting new writers around.”—Daily Mail (UK)
