"Grass is one of the few great writers in Europe today" Sunday Telegraph "Gunter Grass releases, against the grain of history, a troop of obsessional characters, armed often with magical or at least disconcerting powers, who gnaw through the madness of the Third Reich and the chaos of the collapse, into the complacent fabric of modern West Germany" -- Neal Ascherson New Statesman "Forty years of twentieth-century German history observed through a massive fable about men and dogs. Mad, Gothic, repetitive and bitterly funny" -- Michael Ratcliffe Sunday Times