The Quiet American

“There has been no novel of any political scope about Vietnam since Graham Greene wrote The Quiet American.” —Harper’s
 
“Evokes the exotic promise of the Orient, and the troubled relationship Vietnam has with the West.” —Wanderlust
 
“The best novel written about the war in Indo-China.” —Chicago Sun-Times
 
“The Quiet American is as near a masterpiece as anything else I have ever read in the last twenty years.” —Daily Express
 
“Written with Greene’s great technical skill and imagination.” —The New York Times
 
“A continuously intriguing piece of storytelling . . . Greene has brought into vivid relief a universal human problem—the fearful price of innocence—and has shown that behind innocence there lurk unconscious arrogance and a self-righteous streak of moral blindness.” —The Atlantic Monthly
 
“You must read The Quiet American . . . it explains our past, in Southeast Asia, trains light on our present in many places, and perhaps foreshadows our future if we don’t take heed. . . . A heartrending romance . . . Haunting and profound.” —All Things Considered, NPR
 
“One of the most brilliant, disturbing novels of our time.” —Saturday Review

Praise for Graham Greene
“The most ingenious, inventive and exciting of our novelists, rich in exactly etched and moving portraits of real human beings . . . A master of storytelling.” —V. S. Pritchett, The Times (London)
 
“In a class by himself . . . The ultimate chronicler of twentieth-century man’s consciousness and anxiety.” —William Golding
 
“A superb storyteller with a gift for provoking controversy.” —The New York Times
 
“Greene had the sharpest eyes for trouble, the finest nose for human weaknesses, and was pitilessly honest in his observations. . . . For experience of a whole century he was the man within.” —Norman Sherry, The Independent
 
“No serious writer of [the twentieth] century has more thoroughly invaded and shaped the public imagination than Graham Greene.” —Time
 
“One of the finest writers of any language.” —The Washington Post
 
“A superb storyteller—he had a talent for depicting local colour, a keen sense of the dramatic, an eye for dialogue, and skill in pacing his prose.” —The New York Times
 
“Graham Greene was a profound and experimental stylist.” —Time Out
 
“Graham Greene had wit and grace and character and story and a transcendent universal compassion that places him for all time in the ranks of world literature.” —John le Carré
 
“Greene was a force beyond his books.” —Melvyn Bragg
 
“Greene’s fictional products are to conventional mystery stories what an Alfred Hitchcock exercise in cinematic suspense is to the ordinary Grade B Whodunit.” —Weekly Book Review
 
“Mr. Greene’s extraordinary power of plot-making, of suspense and of narration . . . moves continuously both in time and space and in emotion.” —The Times (London)
 
“Graham Greene taught us to understand the social and economic cripples in our midst. He taught us to look at each other with new eyes. I don’t suppose his influence will ever disappear.” —Auberon Waugh, The Independent
 
“A masterly storyteller . . . An enormously popular writer who was also one of the most significant novelists of his time.” —Newsweek