THE REVELATIONS
The Revelations is my first novel. It’s also probably the best thing I’ll ever write. To this day I still occasionally get an email from someone saying that it’s their favorite novel of all time.
As I’ve written about, the novel was not reviewed by any major magazines or outlets when it launched here in the US, despite coming out from a major publisher and Barnes and Noble buying several copies for every store in America. This has led to readers saying things like this:
It’s the best, most underrated book and the publisher’s marketing team should be fired for misbranding it in the US, because everyone should be reading and hyping on this novel. . .
In comparison to the US edition, in Italy The Revelations has become a sensation—I’ve lost track of the number of reviews sent my way after the Italian translation and debut last year.
What is the book? A murder mystery set in the world of scientific research into consciousness. A hymn to New York City. A expose of academia and the careerism of science. A cautionary tale for would-be geniuses. A bildungsroman. A message from an alien star.
Here’s a small selection of what people have said about it:
“Proust, Bergson and before them St. Paul and St. Augustine have not gone in vain.” -SIR press
“The novel is packed full with ideas, debates, scientific inquiry, and language that seems itself to come alive.” -Crime Reads
“Erik Hoel has crafted an audacious literary thriller. The Revelations is hilarious and deeply serious, heady and carnal and intellectual, all at once.” –Catherine Chung, author of The Tenth Muse, fiction editor of Guernica magazine
“The Revelations is a fascinating invitation to link minds with a brilliant neuroscientist and take part in a daring literary thought experiment.” –Sophie Ward, Booker-longlisted author of Love and Other Thoughts Experiments
“Sly and erudite, The Revelations grabs you by the res cogitans and plunges, with pulse-pounding suspense, into a shadowy hall-of-mirrors mystery—which turns out to be nothing less than the blooming, buzzing, sultry confusion of being young and alive in New York.” -Roy Scranton, author of Learning to Die in the Anthropocene and War Porn
“To discover the complexities of Hoel’s writing is to look straight into the dreadful eyes of agony, to breathe in the claustrophobia of a captivated being, to smell the blood oozing from the corners of its drilled skull, to witness rodents scavenge on once living flesh, without promise of deliverance.” -Berfrois Magazine
“I have been writing and reading daily for decades, and I have never read anything like Erik Hoel’s remarkable debut novel.
–Andre Dubus III, author of House of Sand and Fog
“The Revelations is a stunningly written, Escheresque novel, concerned with the great mysteries of our age. It left me smarter for having read it.” -Dana Czapnik, author of The Falconer