* With obvious affinities to Kafka's The Castle, The Tartar Steppe is a serener and more immediately rewarding book. The Times * It is not often that a masterpiece falls into one's hands. But The Tartar Steppe is undoubtedly a masterpiece, a sublime book and Buzzati a master of the written word. -- John Keegan Sunday Times * A beautiful, masterly novel that shimmers like a mirage, bringing into sharp focus the rise and fall of our ambitions and the pitiless erosion of time. It is the story of one Giovanni Drogo - yet how many of us will be stricken to recognise something of ourselves in him? -- Yann Martel * The Tartar Steppe is a nightmare, a comedy of errors, a beautiful and anguished fable, a call to resistance against folly, the inspired assurance that one last act may justify our lifelong struggle to remain human. -- Alberto Manguel * There are names that the coming generations will not resign themselves to forget. Surely one of them is that of Dino Buzzati. -- Jose Luis Borges * A strange and haunting novel, an eccentric classic. -- J.M. Coetzee * Sober and luminous. -- Yann Martel

DINO BUZZATI (1906-1972) was an Italian editor, novelist, poet, playwright, and short story writer. He has been lauded as one of Europe's foremost experimental writers of the twentieth century. Canongate published his seminal work The Tartar Steppe in April 2007.