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Outstanding
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San Francisco Chronicle Jesse Berrett
More than anything else, this reviewer envies anyone who picks it up and enjoys the continual rations of delight this novel has to deal out.
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Outstanding
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The New Yorker
Meek expertly renders each man's devotion to the task of securing paradise on earth, and exposes the unsettling affinity between the devout servant of God and the cold, calculating murderer.
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Outstanding
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The Spectator John de Falbe
[Meek's] book is a humdinger; brace yourself for a shock or two, but be sure to read The People's Act Of Love.
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Outstanding
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Booklist David Wright
This is stunning, masterful fiction. [15 Oct 2005, p. 31]
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Outstanding
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The Guardian Irvine Welsh
The People's Act of Love has a timeless quality; it will be read, referenced, studied and talked about for years to come.
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Outstanding
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Kirkus Reviews
A provocative, skillfully plotted, emotionally engaging fiction--and a giant step forward for the gifted Meek.
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Outstanding
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Los Angeles Times Susan Salter Reynolds
It is a grand novel, and yet Meek's true genius is his ability to keep a finger on the pulse of each of his characters. [8 Jan 2006, R11]
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Outstanding
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Publishers Weekly
This original, literary page-turner succeeds both with its credible psychological detail and in its grandeur and sweep.
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Outstanding
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The Globe And Mail [Toronto] Thomas Wharton
Shocking, compelling... forget the devalued adjectives. This novel is very, very good. You will soon be reading it. [10 Sep 2005]
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Outstanding
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The New York Times Book Review Boris Fishman
[T]his ingenious, intricate novel, a meditation on grand ideas that is also a suspenseful page turner, avoids that too-easy wonder Russia often inspires in its admirers.
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Outstanding
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Washington Post Michael Dirda
An altogether soul-shaking novel, tightly mixing pathos and grandeur.
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Favorable
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The Independent Lesley Chamberlain
An ambitious work, authentically Russian-flavoured, and unusual both by virtue of its subject and its author.
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Favorable
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Boston Globe Nan Goldberg
Meek's writing is so calm and graceful that it is possible to read about stomach-turning events almost as if the story were a fairy tale--long, long ago, and far away, and thus unthreatening. His descriptions of the harsh, unforgiving landscape are gorgeous. His characters are complex and all too recognizable as human.
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Favorable
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Daily Telegraph M John Harrison
Meek has the most extraordinary visual imagination. His descriptions are often so vivid that you try to turn away while reading.
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Favorable
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Entertainment Weekly Ben Spier
The People's Act of Love stands not only as a keenly observed historical thriller but as a resonant tale of how one man's moral fervor can turn to horror.
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Favorable
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London Review Of Books Michael Wood
James Meek's early fiction is alert, acrid and funny, and only slightly too insistent on its own quirkiness--as if it were hoping reviewers would call it surreal (they did) and confident that this would be a good thing. These qualities make for many sudden pleasures of reading, but I could find nothing in the two novels and the two collections of stories... that prepared me for the eloquent sobriety of the new book, The People's Act of Love, and its entirely different sense of what is strange.
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Mixed
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The Guardian Jane Stevenson
Meek portrays an inchoate, dysfunctional society in which human destinies are tumbled about in an arbitrary fashion, but creates within it an oasis of implausible order.
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Mixed
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Library Journal Edward Cone
Instead of becoming the page-turner it might have been, the novel instead has an almost documentary feel, with touches of Tolstoy and Dostoevsky in the ruminations of the main characters. [1 Dec 2005, p. 114]
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