"It’s overly glib to call a book a page-turner. But the fact is, I entered this one somewhat casually, with few expectations: widowed mother and spinster daughter fall on hard times and turn their house into a bed-sit? What else is new? What was new were the tenants who turned life upside down in startlingly erotic and terrifying ways. I could not put this one down. And in fact I would pick it up again in a heartbeat—even knowing what happens. It’s how it happens that grabs you and won’t let go."

"This is a page-turner that begins with a magical premise—a mind born new right at the moment of a body’s death. We begin with death and move backward through a life, as seen through the ‘eyes’ of this new mind, and we track the actions of the character’s body through everything it did before it died. This is curious enough, but the mind telling the story understands the world backward, as if on ‘rewind.’ Does this make any sense? It does in Amis’s hands and has a bizarrely profound impact."