Glyn Maxwell writes:
Stories. True stories, false stories, good stories, rotten stories. Everything in Hemon’s beautiful new novel trembles within this matrix, where a story’s force or charm is at least as significant as its veracity. Take that diamond of a title: one of the most astonishing episodes in the Christian tradition fused with a tentative Latinate gesture of a word, the promise of a great happening but not any time soon. Mythology’s most astonishing answer to a human wish is coupled to the sound of human wish at its humblest, most humdrum, least accomplished: a miracle in a ring-binder.

The Lazarus Project is an epic narrative born from a historical event – the 1908 killing of a 19 year old Jewish immigrant by the chief of Chicago police. The story follows Vladimir Brik, a Bosnian-American writer, who, a century later, gets funding to travel to Eastern Europe to unearth what really happened. Patrick McGrath says of it in Bookforum: "The Lazarus Project is the fearless and spirited expression of a turbulent literary talent and, at the same time, a cold, fierce blast of moral outrage. For all Hemon’s nods to other writers—one catches glimpses not only of Nabokov and Sebald but of Bulgakov, Pamuk, Amis, Poe—he is entirely his own man, an original who owes no debts to anyone."

Picador | hardback 294 pp. |ISBN: 9780330458412