"Whimsy, muscular good fun, and scarifying wisdom mark this spectacularly well told parable by one of America's most adventurous writers."
-- Thomas Keneally
"Readers in quest of civilized fun are advised to visit Freeland at once. Forget Shangri-La, Angria, Islandia, Graustark. Freeland has it all: a richly invented society, comical in its detail...romance wit, compelling description...and, strewn throughout this playful, wholehearted work, an array of subtly illuminating political metaphors."
-- Norman Rush
"Two wildly idealistic main characters propel this grand, sprawling, satiric novel...But its appeal lies mostly in the pleasure of watching Leithauser's extraordinarily rich imagination at play as he conjures an entire people out of the frigid waters of the North Atlantic."
-- Publishers Weekly
Brad Leithauser was born in Detroit and graduated from Harvard College and Harvard Law School. He is the author of three other novels (Equal Distance, Hence, and Seaward), three volumes of poetry (Hundreds of Fireflies, Cats of the Temple, and The Mail from Anywhere), and a book of essays (Penchants and Places). He also edited The Norton Book of Ghost Stories. He is the recipient of many awards for his writing, including a Guggenheim Fellowship, an Ingram Merrill grant, and a MacArthur Fellowship. He recently served for a year as Time magazine's theater critic. He and his wife, the poet Mary Jo Salter, are the Emily Dickinson Lecturers in the Humanities at Mount Holyoke College. They live with their two daughters, Emily and Hilary, in South Hadley, Massachusetts.