Loving Little Egypt

"A dazzling and heart-warming display of scientific derring-do. . . . It will steal your heart."

"[McMahon's novels] combine sophisticated scientific lore with a well-developed sense of human-ness. They are learned, funny, spiritual, and sexy. It would not be disgraceful to compare them with the work of Gabriel Garcia Marquez. Indeed, McMahon is a kind of Yankee magic realist, mixing the fantastic with the ordinary so seamlessly that one can't finally decided which is which--the search for nature's secrets and the search for love prove equally intoxicating. Written largely in a plain style--the prose soars only when a character is drunk on the pursuit of scientific truth--they are deceptively light, a cabinet of wonders and of spirit."

"Humorous and generous yet sometimes disconcertingly fatalistic, McMahon's storytelling is based on an irresistible curiosity about how the world works.... His narratives are full of colorful background detail and impulsive detours; they're equally respectful of human dedication and nature's haphazard way of bestowing rewards and punishments. In keeping with this freewheeling spirit, McMahon has a style that manages to animate not only the people in a novel but its objects and landscapes."

"A technical fable crackling with the elation, nostalgia, and suspense of scientific discovery. . . . The pleasures of McMahon's prose are constant."

"McMahon has a lively, resonant style and an eye for vivid detail. In the same paragraph he can introduce readers to the relevant scientific lore and entice them to experience the mystery at the core of everyday life."

"A slam-bang adventure tale. . . . As the novel delights in its own power to make the grim amusing and the dour delightful, it leaks its own positiveness onto the reader, lighting the air around him."

"It's all good fun, and McMahon's touch is light enough to make it work. The overall effect is that of a Doctorow scrapbook-novel, the kind of hazy, self-invented history that so appeals to us Americans, who have no sense of the past."

"[McMahon] is so much less well known than he deserves to be. His later novels, increasingly wry and exaggerated, bear a family resemblance to those of Kurt Vonnegut and to certain of Saul Bellow's works. Yet there is an underlying sweetness to McMahon's writing, a wholehearted engagement with those elements of scientific wonder that most resemble artistic creativity."--Bookforum