The Hummingbird

"The Hummingbird is a masterly novel, a brilliantly conceived mosaic of love and tragedy.  Veronesi creates a thought-rich and ultimately comic meditation on human error and lost chances.It’s a cabinet of curiosities and delights, packed with small wonders, strange and sudden turns, insights of great poise and unusual cultural reference points. The Hummingbird in an object lesson in authorial control. Veronesi truly knows and loves all matters of the heart."  — Ian McEwan
“I love Sandro Veronesi’s book, The Hummingbird. A real masterpiece. A funny, touching, profound book that made me cry like a little girl on the last page.” — Leïla Slimani, author of The Perfect Nanny
"Everything that makes the novel worthwhile and engaging is here: warmth, wit, intelligence, love, death, high seriousness, low comedy, philosophy, subtle personal relationships and the complex interior life of human beings . . . magnificent—moving, replete, beautiful." — The Guardian
“How do you begin telling the story of a great love when you know it ended in disaster?” this novel asks. . . . The temporal leaps, though sometimes disorienting, cunningly mimic the eddying, insistent nature of memory itself.” — The New Yorker
"Somehow or other Sandro Veronesi pulls off the extraordinary feat of making you believe he is writing for your ears alone. I cannot tell you what The Hummingbird is about because that would be to betray a confidence. But I can tell you it's a mightily clever novel." — Howard Jacobson, Winner of the Booker Prize
“Veronesi draws a sumptuous portrait of a character whose failings are his biggest charm and who wrestles with sibling and parental issues like most of us… A moving reminder that even the most ordinary lives are peppered with touches of the extraordinary." — Booklist (starred review)
“Cleverly structured like a jigsaw puzzle … Veronesi’s dark modern chronicle shimmers with intelligence and flashes of pathos.” — Publishers Weekly (starred review)
"I have known for quite some time that Sandro Veronesi was one of the most skillful and profound Italian storytellers of the past thirty years. But The Hummingbird is the decisive proof of his sensitivity, of his extraordinary strength as a writer."
— Domenico Starnone, National Book Award Finalist
"A great novel, vibrating with life and death, happiness and pain, nostalgia and hope for the future."
— Vanity Fair
 "Reading The Hummingbird is not just a moving experience: it's almost like a therapy session, a lesson in persevering, in letting go of guilt to find ourselves again."
— Huffington Post
"Outstanding. A perturbing masterpiece. Absolute beauty in the smallest detail."
— Corriere della Serra
"No other writer in Italy today can tell a story like Sandro Veronesi."
— La Stampa
"Powerful and seductive."
— La Repubblica
  "Instantly immersive, playfully inventive, effortlessly wise... a family saga that pays homage to the quiet heroism required by day-to-day existence."
— The Observer (London)
"Sandro Veronesi is a big name in European literature ... Veronesi originally trained as an architect and, rather marvelously, it shows: the structure is inventive, bold, unexpected - slightly bonkers but elegant, and cohesive ... [it] conveys life’s messy unpredictability: joy and desperation, simple pleasures, moments of transcendence, much reeling and confusion ... There is a pleasing sense of having grappled with the real stuff of life: loss, grief, love, desire, pain, uncertainty, confusion, joy, despair - all while having fun." — Sunday Times (London)
"A masterpiece of articulation ... a towering achievement ... Not since William Boyd’s Any Human Heart has a novel captured the feast and famine nature of a single life with such invention and tenderness. Veronesi explores, with great humor, how the passage of time both expands and expunges the impact of events. And, he suggests, after the pounding of years it is only an individual's character that determines whether or not the edifice will hold."
— Financial Times
"Veronesi has penned a powerful Shakespearean tale of one man’s life, filled with tragedy, loss, and star-crossed love." — Library Journal
“Jumping through time and unfolding through poetry, emails, postcards, and dialogue, the story is a celebration of hope and optimism in the face of terrible tragedy”
— Harper’s Bazaar
“The Hummingbird is a moving, black-humored work about family and the tragedies born of time and poor decisions. Veronesi has created complicated characters that don’t always behave nobly, are products of their time and are, from a literary standpoint, the richer for it.” — BookPage
“…Mr. Veronesi is an expert at playing on the reader’s deepest fears and hopes in emotionally involving ways”
— Wall Street Journal