The Passage

Justin Cronin is the New York Times bestselling author of The Passage, The Twelve, The City of Mirrors, Mary and O'Neil (which won the PEN/Hemingway Award and the Stephen Crane Prize), and The Summer Guest. His other honors include a fellowship from the National Endowment for the Arts and a Whiting Writers' Award. A Distinguished Faculty Fellow at Rice University, he divides his time between Houston, Texas, and Cape Cod, Massachusetts.

If you only take one book away with you this summer, make it THE PASSAGE. It's an absorbing, nightmarish dream of a book, a terrifying apocalyptic thriller, populated by believable, sympathetic characters. Once you start reading it, you won't want it to end. THE TIMES The stuff of reading frenzies SUNDAY TELEGRAPH Cronin's massive novel transcends its cliches and delivers a feverishly readable post-apocalyptic-cum-vampire chiller. It's not only a brilliantly told story, with thrilling plot twists and graphic action sequences, but a moving psychological portrait of survivors facing up to the poignant fact of a lost past and a horrifically uncertain future. GUARDIAN A truly epic masterpiece that will have you hanging on for dear life -- Maxim Jakubowski LOVEREADING.CO.UK For most of this enthralling novel, it's not difficult to discern why the publisher is so excited. Cronin writes with verve and versatility, and is just as good in action scenes as he is in handling more literary material. His reinvention of vampires niftily ditches Transylvanian cliches and his future world is richly imagined. Above all, Amy is a superb creation, believably human yet beguilingly enigmatic. SUNDAY TIMES This epic tale is truly exhilarating stuff but what makes THE PASSAGE work so well is not its massive canvas, but the concentration on its human characters, notably six-year-old redhead Amy Harper Bellafonte. DAILY EXPRESS Epic, apocalyptic, heart-wrenching, catastrophic, mesmerisizing... DAILY MIRROR Every so often a novel-reader's novel comes along: an enthralling, entertaining story wedded to simple, supple prose, both informed by tremendous imagination. Read 15 pages, and you will find yourself captivated; read 30 and you will find yourself taken prisoner and reading late into the night. It had the vividness that only epic works of fantasy and imagination can achieve. What else can I say? This: read this book and the ordinary world disappears. -- Stephen King Cronin is a skilled