"This is an expansive book tangling big ideas on class and race, marriage and politics. MacKenzie has found a narrator who can voice many of the uncomfortable issues of our time: one cannot help but read on. There is also a delight in words that is wonderful to read, a delicious speed to the prose. Feast Days is not a thriller, but reads a little like one, moving swiftly from one kind of experience to the next with brutal, dazzling effect."
– The Guardian
"There is a tension that anything could happen, that snap decisions have life-altering repercussions. Feast Days is a sophisticated and astute story of expatriate life told from a truly convincing, captivating female voice."
– The Irish Times
“Brilliant . . . a pervasive sense of unrest, both large and small scale, social and personal, [is] conveyed in MacKenzie’s unruffled, discerning prose. With it, MacKenzie has captured one of the most memorable narrative voices in recent fiction.”
— Publishers Weekly (starred and boxed review)
“This brilliant novel has no time for platitudes or conventional, ankle-deep morality; it plunges us straight to the depths. I’m not sure I know another book that feels at once so disaffected and so full of longing, so expansive in its sympathy and so terrifying in its candor. Devastating, funny and wise, it’s among the best novels I know about the fate of American innocence abroad.”
"Feast Days is a wry, arresting, clear-eyed, unsentimental, utterly fresh take on the most urgent narrative questions there are. Class, money, politics, race, globalization, marriage, gender, reproduction, culture: Ian MacKenzie engages it all with such keen intelligence and wit your eyes feel new. Magnificent, deep, profound, and true."
– Elisa Albert, author of After Birth
"Feast Days is so much more than a novel. It's an all-consuming meditation on the modern condition, the search for rootedness in the ever-shifting worlds of our own creation, told by a writer so gifted with language that you forget who you are in the poetry of his prose."
– Uzodinma Iweala, author of Beasts of No Nation
"Intelligent and atmospheric, Feast Days deftly limns the inner life of a foreigner whose own trajectory becomes increasingly bound up with the tensions and complexities of the society in which she has landed."
– Chloe Aridjis, author of Book of Clouds
“There is a sly, brooding intelligence at work in this novel, recalling for me the startling, highest times in American literature. MacKenzie is not just a great writer in the making – he’s already there.”
“Elegant . . . MacKenzie’s economy is remarkable. Using thin brushstrokes, inventive turns of phrase, and fragmentary, dialogue-heavy sections, he deftly captures how an outsider is only able to comprehend a country in pieces, assembling an incomplete puzzle over time. . . . Wry and melancholy.”
"Poignant and perceptive . . . a satisfyingly complex look at the challenges of life abroad."
– Booklist